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Thread: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

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    Exclamation July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    With the pending end of free upgrades to Windows 10 coming, I wondered if this is figuring into anyone's decisions.

    Yes, it impacts Win8/Win8.1 users but they're already more than halfway aboard anyway. I was thinking of Windows 7 users and also pre-Win7 users who have copies of Win7 they've been postponing installing until they have to.

    Anyone who expects to upgrade to Win10 eventually anyway might well consider this the last push they need to get around to installing Win7.


    Obviously doing an upgrade install from WinXP or Vista to Win7 and then turning around and upgrading that to Win10 could result in a dicey and possibly flaky result. So where possible it usually makes more sense to do a clean install.

    You'd probably at least want to do a clean Win7 install and upgrade that. As far as I know once that completes you could then turn around and do a clean Win10 install once your product key has been "upgraded" since you can download a full Win10 image to do a clean install from.


    So...

    Any thoughts on "getting it in gear" to take advantage of the free Win10?

    Any thoughts on the whole upgrade install vs. clean install, and in particular the clean Win10 install subsequent to an upgrade from Win7?

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Thanks for hte info

    I have been running the same Win7 since I got it with my mvp. Good idea about doing a clean install and then the upgrade. As long as they give a win10 product key it should work out.

    I'll have to throw in a fresh ssd and install win7, do the upgrade to win10 and then swap back my original win7 ssd so I dont have to spend the time or risk upgrading my primary win7 ssd install.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Nope. I have had a few icons in taskbars pressing Win 10 on me lately but they have failed to move me atomic distances nearer to 10.

    Let's see. I have brand names boxes running XP, Vista, Win 7 (2), Win 8, Win 8.1. All are required to test software compatibility for my projects. Main developer box currently is Win 7/64. All of them have Windows Update turned off. Only one has regular access to the Internet, others using it very sparingly anyway.

    I used to have a Win10 box running TP (technical preview), but since that computer was a generic one with no Windows license, I turned it into a Linux box when TP expired. It served its purpose of showing that RAD is still alive and a practical reality till 2024, so it is not needed anymore, for the time being anyway.

    Win 10 being so ugly, i decided to keep all boxes on 7 or 8. While appearance is a high score motive, there are other annoyances about 10 I will not go about at this point.

    So thanks Microsoft but no thanks.

    No issues therefore on updating, or a clean machine, or install or roll-back or any kind of aggravation that may/will happen until 10 is truly ready for prime-time, which it is not right now IMO.

    Time saved will close to pay for a new Win10 box brand new from the store with a clean install, whenever the time comes. That's my strategy on Win 10 : free is a waste of time and efforts, thus money. Hardly a bargain.

    Sometimes I wish MS would understand by now they have not delivered anything worthy to me for the last 15 years, but the past has shown that users don't have a say when you are the only game in town.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    I understand the reasons why many are choosing to avoid moving beyond Windows 7. But others may be wondering if this upcoming change amounts to something like:

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    I upgraded to Win10 on the surface and it's been just fine. I turned off all the stuff that could be turned off, but only so that MS doesn't realize I have no life and tries to rent out my house. Actually I just use the Surface as a DB server, ebook reader, word processor and trivial gaming, but it isn't traveling so much these days.
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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    I agree that it can be made "liveable" with some tweaking. That and getting used to where all sorts of setting and things have been hidden as they've rearranged the deckchairs the last few releases (perhaps merely to keep employing a few of the relatives of executives).

    The question in my mind is whether this sunsetting of the "free upgrades" is enough to compel anyone to go ahead with it on their main PCs.


    A week or two after that a major upgrade is coming too. I think of last November's update as taking things from Windows 10 to Windows 10.1 and this upcoming change taking that on to Windows 10.2 myself. But Microsoft perfers to pretend these radical upgrades aren't even Service Packs, let alone Windows 11, 12, etc.

    I test applications on Windows 10.q where "q" is whatever is current at the time. Once one of these big changes comes along I don't even try to keep VMs around with the intermediate sub-versions installed. Anybody on Win10 who doesn't apply the updates won't be getting any special support from me. These rolling mutations are too much to keep up with as it is, let alone considering they don't have any formal designations aside from the patch level.

    It's just one big theme park flume ride and they've made support as big of a headache as on mobile OSs.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    The way I see it is those user who use it now will be able to continue to use it for free as long as they don't downgrade! Only those who don't have Windows 10 current installed will be affected. The is to say there the is no deactivation after 31/07/2016 for people using Windows 10 before this date.
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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    I tried to install Win 10 on my main development workstation when it first came out. It failed to install - scared the hell out of me - and I was able to roll it back and come up Win 7 again.

    I did install Win 10 on my Surface Pro 2 - that's working fine.

    So at this point I'm guessing they got all my drivers updated for Win 10 - but I'm still afraid to try again.

    Maybe over the 4th of July weekend when I can afford hours of downtime seeing how far I can get...

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Ignoring politics, I think this was a very generously long 'upgrade' period and imagine most people who want to upgrade have already done so.

    The following with a large dose of "this is subjective":
    This is a kind of rubber-meets-the-road point in this Windows era, and I'm kind of curious what happens. I feel like MS wants to separate "Desktop Windows" from "the new Windows, whatever it is". I wonder if Win10, and its relative failure to convert people, won't be the lever they use to justify it.

    MS is getting really bad at transitioning users. It feels like they used to take smaller steps. I think 90s Microsoft would've released Win10 first, then a Win11 much like it, then a Windows with a more full-on 'new framework' approach like Win8 after people had time to adjust to the hybrid world. I don't know if that would've even worked, but I do think Win8 rubbed salt in some wounds and convinced people to avoid Win10 out of spite.

    I look at the Windows ecosystem and I'm starting to find it as confusing as Linux. It feels like it's fragmenting, and I hope MS can find a way to unify developers. If they think their consumer goals involve a future more like Windows 8, I hope that happens after they fork off some 'stable desktop' version of Windows for the enterprise.

    Though, on the other hand, if they don't, there's going to be a lot of opportunities for conversion programmers in the near future. It's not my favorite kind of work, but it's work.

    Are any of you nervous enough to be branching out? I've not hidden that I've been experimenting with Mono and even iOS development.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by dilettante View Post
    You'd probably at least want to do a clean Win7 install and upgrade that. As far as I know once that completes you could then turn around and do a clean Win10 install once your product key has been "upgraded" since you can download a full Win10 image to do a clean install from.
    That's what I just did with my son's PC, largely because I was forced to anyway since he replaced his motherboard and it wouldn't boot Windows since it lacked chipset drivers I assume. Figured less headache to reinstall and reactivate his Win 7 than swap everything back and try to pre-load needed drivers. Anyway, what really pissed me off was that I couldn't find any way to upgrade using the ISO (partially because his wasn't on the network). It insisted on having a Win 10 key and no way to skip that step. I was trying to download 3+ GB only once since we have several other PCs that need to get the "free" digital entitlement in the next month. Tried all sorts of options, but finally had to move the PC so I could connect to MS and do the upgrade and download 3+ GB all over again. Surely there is a way to get around that???

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    I had the idea that once you have "upgraded" Windows 7 (or 8+) to Windows 10 and activated... that you can use a Win10 ISO or flash drive image to do a clean install using that "upgraded" Win7 product key. And that the product key is no longer good for installing Win7 anymore once you get past the "remorse interval" that lets you roll back for 90 days or whatever it is.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by Sitten Spynne View Post
    Are any of you nervous enough to be branching out? I've not hidden that I've been experimenting with Mono and even iOS development.
    I've moved with my customers to Android for a lot of things. I do almost no VB6 work except recreationally anymore.

    I've been looking hard at Remix OS as an eventual alternative. As a repackaged Android it avoids many of the things that keep me from adopting a conventional Linux distribution. However I would not be ready to make the move until I can develop for Android/Remix on Remix.

    So far AIDE (Android IDE) is a baby step but not quite there.

    Another thing missing is a good "end-user programming" tool like QBasic was for DOS and in some respects like VB6 still is for Windows. "RFO Basic!" is partway there but I really don't care for it much.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    I'm starting into Android development for tablets with Xamarin. I try not to think about the economics of what I'm doing, because it's insane. We have some people pushing us to use tablets in the field. Note that our "field" work pretty much means using them in water. For that to work, we need some rugged devices. Ruggedized iPads are nice pieces of hardware, but they're pretty crappy for this kind of work, in my opinion, since they lack sd ports and they shut down at around 90 degrees (F), which is pretty stupid. There are no ruggedized Windows tablets that I'm aware of. The NFL and MS ran all those commercials showing Surface Pros running in waterproof cases, but those cases were apparently made exclusively for the NFL and aren't sold on the retail market...yet. Due to policy issues, we can't get Surfaces anyways.

    That leaves me with Android tablets, and there are some nice ones out there, but the really durable ones are really expensive, and even the less durable ones...well, that's where the economics comes in. We can get slightly more reliable data slightly faster. How much cost is justified by that? I'd say almost none, but it's not my decision.

    Anyways, it's fun. One of these days, Sitten and I will be able to drone back and forth about Xamarin with posts that push the size limit of the forum. I'm not there yet, though.
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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    I've only done one proof-of-concept on an Android - using Eclipse.

    What are the benefits/differences seen in Xamarim?

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Can't say, yet, aside from the largest one for me: It's a language I'm already fairly familiar with and Xamarin is now free with VS2015 (perhaps SP2, or something like that). It was too expensive to mess with previously, now it's too cheap to ignore the benefits of not needing to learn yet another language.

    On the other hand, I have really only spent part of one day on it, cause I keep getting called away to do other things. I did get a little test app running on the device, though, so there is that. It's not as smooth a process as it could be, so if MS is serious about it, there are plenty of rough edges to grind off.
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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    I've done a lot more with Xamarin, though I use Forms instead of /just/ the Android product so my view's a little different. I'll limit things to Android-specific, though iOS isn't much different in this context. This is like a bullet list with no bullets.

    The biggest benefit is you get to use VB or C# and the bulk of the .NET APIs to write code for Android. You don't have to learn/gain expertise in Java, or adapt to a Java IDE/toolchain.

    Xamarin provides .NET-oriented wrappers for probably 99%, maybe more, of the Android APIs. With a little bit of thought, you can read articles oriented towards Android developers and feel your way through the Xamarin APIs. So you get to read years of Android-focused tutorial content and apply it to your work. Which is generally good, because there's not a critical mass of Xamarin bloggers so it's often more productive to search for Android tutorials.

    Potential downside is it isn't a magic pill: you need to know a good bit about how Android works and how Android applications work to use Xamarin effectively. There's things about the app lifecycle and how the "Back" button works that are very, very different from how Desktop applications behave.

    There's no Windows Forms in Android. It uses a markup language like XAML to define its UI, and it has its own suite of native controls. If you don't use Xamarin Forms, you'll be using that markup language and those controls. You'll have to learn a new layout system, some new control behaviors, etc.

    Xamarin Forms is useful if you want to target Android and iOS. It uses XAML and a suite of controls that represent the least-common-denominator intersection of layout/UI controls in Android and iOS. It can be extended to support native things it hasn't abstracted, or add features that are missing. If you're only targeting Android, I think it's a little more pain to use Xamarin Forms instead of just the Android features. But if you're already familiar with WPF, Xamarin Forms is closer to that than Android's UI framework is, hard to say.

    So it's a good deal if you're already paying for Visual Studio and want to be productive at writing applications fairly quickly. The toolchain's tough to work with, but I get the feeling a lot of that is Android's fault and not Xamarin's. iOS isn't without its woes, but if you're the administrator of your company's Apple Developer account then you won't experience a tenth of the woes I'm experiencing. (I've got a test iPad I can't deploy to because it's a /process/ to get a device added to our provisioning profile, and I haven't said the right incantations yet.)

    If I were going one-OS-only, I'd probably consider going native just to eliminate points of failure. But if you might need to target iOS and Android, trying to do so with native means juggling two different codebases or fiddling with the OTHER kind of cross-platform framework, which is "Write HTML/JS pages and host them in a WebView". Believe it or not, those are worse than Xamarin.

    It definitely feels rough. Xamarin's been a small company despite its pedigree. I'm really hoping MS throws a lot of R&D effort into polishing those rough edges, and not instead trying to run them into the ground.

    In short, if you've played with WPF, know a little about MVVM, and are familiar with modern OOP mentalities it's a fairly smooth transition to try a Xamarin framework. If Windows Forms is all you've ever looked at, the whole thing might make more sense if you try out WPF first. It feels like most Xamarin content assumes you're really familiar with WPF concepts. I don't think there's as many people who can claim that as they think.
    Last edited by Sitten Spynne; Jun 30th, 2016 at 11:56 AM.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    @sitten - thanks for the info.

    What you've said kind of leads me to want to stay with Eclipse. I've already gotten familiar with the areas I've needed to and don't mind the markup stuff for the UI.

    btw - this book was a good read when I first started with Android - made things like the back button and general UI conventions really clear (I hate when I use an Android app that break those rules - you can't commandeer those buttons for your own use!)

    http://scanlibs.com/the-android-developers-cookbook/

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    All of the Android work I've done has been for internal use by clients, done to their spec. I'm not doing anything for the general market so I don't have to deal with that part of it.

    At first I was using Eclipse and Java, but found B4A much more productive myself. Depending on the task it might be all B4A, all Java, or a mix of the two.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by dilettante View Post
    I had the idea that once you have "upgraded" Windows 7 (or 8+) to Windows 10 and activated... that you can use a Win10 ISO or flash drive image to do a clean install using that "upgraded" Win7 product key. And that the product key is no longer good for installing Win7 anymore once you get past the "remorse interval" that lets you roll back for 90 days or whatever it is.
    I believe that is true though I'm not sure about not being able to reactivate the Win 7 after 30 days. You can't roll back, but I don't know if that means you also can't reactivate it. Nevertheless, I find it utterly ridiculous that they are forcing everyone to download 3+ GB to upgrade EVERY PC. You should be able to upgrade by booting into 7, sticking in the DVD and selecting an upgrade option. If that exists today, I don't know how to find it. What are folk with limited bandwidth supposed to do?

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by topshot View Post
    Nevertheless, I find it utterly ridiculous that they are forcing everyone to download 3+ GB to upgrade EVERY PC. You should be able to upgrade by booting into 7, sticking in the DVD and selecting an upgrade option. If that exists today, I don't know how to find it. What are folk with limited bandwidth supposed to do?
    But what DVD? Do you mean a retail or OEM Windows 10 DVD?

    If so, surely there is an upgrade install option? Of course since I don't have a retail Win10 DVD I have no clue whether that upgrade is free or requires a new product key (and license).

    Maybe you can download the ISO, burn a DVD, and use this to upgrade any number of activated Win7 machines to Win10 through the deadline? They'd probably need to be online to do the upgrade-activate, but it sounds legit and workable to burn several of these DVDs and share them around to people with low bandwidth connections.

    Found this: How to Upgrade to Windows 10, using Windows 10 ISO

    However at best a newly downloaded ISO will have just the huge November update to what I call the Win10.1 update. So in a few more weeks they'll need the bandwidth for the next huge "Win10.2" update anyway. If current ISOs don't have the November Big Update it just gets that much worse.


    All of this bandwidth consumption is almost certainly why by default Win10 PCs act as P2P servers in an upgrade network. The idea is to take some load off Microsoft's servers and in passing maybe make the process quicker for those who can do upgrades from other PCs "closer" to them (such as on the same LAN in business settings).

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Are any of you nervous enough to be branching out?
    I think I'm not so much branching out as retreating. I'm doing less and less work that involves any king of GUI. It's all middle tier/server and DB stuff for me and that's largely universal across platforms.

    I need to be careful though as middle tier work is hard to find and DB work just doesn't excite me like it did 10 years ago. I could get left either out on the cold or bored witless. I've sharpened up by MVC stuff so I'll still be able to do Web If/When MS kick the desktop into the long grass and I really ought to be boning up on some mobile techs. Xamarin seems like the obvious choice but I haven't got round to it yet.

    Mostly I'm playing Total War: Warhammer. You never know, maybe I'll make a career out of that. It's probably a bit niche though.
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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by dilettante View Post
    Maybe you can download the ISO, burn a DVD, and use this to upgrade any number of activated Win7 machines to Win10 through the deadline? They'd probably need to be online to do the upgrade-activate
    Yes, I burned the ISO d/l by their Media Creation Tool, just like the article you linked below. Perhaps the issue was his PC isn't connected, which was the whole point I did that, but it never even offered the choice to upgrade.

    Yes, everything I found was old like that one (last Aug to Oct), but I think the process has changed since then. The screens look the same, but we choose Not Right Now on the Get Important Update screen, it went to Getting things ready and then asked for a key. Tried his Win 7 key but it said it was invalid even before we tried to click Next, which never was enabled.

    However at best a newly downloaded ISO will have just the huge November update to what I call the Win10.1 update.
    Well, that's stupid! Why wouldn't they give you the current release?

    I'll do the next attempt from a connected PC to see if that makes any difference.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    If you download the ISO today it might well have the November update and other smaller updates since then slipstreamed into it already. But they can't include the August 2016 update because it isn't even ready yet, much less available in any form yet.

    If you wait that long the free upgrade offer will already be expired anyway.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    I bet they will bring back the free upgrades because they want people on Win10. I honestly wish I could go back to Windows 7. My search bar on my laptop never works. Apparently I want to search the web for "Control Panel"? Honestly, too lazy to look it up, how are you even supposed to access the control panel????

    Such a learning curve for the simplest things and after having this computer upgraded since Win10 launch, I can say that I honestly regret upgrading.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Hmm... I'm still not sure that anyone has said whether this upcoming sunset on the free offer will (a.) get them to jump on it, or (b.) not make a difference in their plans.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by jayinthe813 View Post
    I bet they will bring back the free upgrades because they want people on Win10.
    The Vista/7 transition era says "don't hold your breath".

    MS spent a lot of money creating tons of documentation around XP->Vista application transitions. They made a really big deal out of telling developers this would not be smooth, and it was in their best interests to move as soon as possible. When 7 released, they deleted the transition guides. It's the most spiteful thing I've ever seen.

    They're telling devs pretty loud that Win10 is the target, and that it'll be easier to transition sooner rather than later. We'll see if history repeats itself.

    My guess is they're betting on if you miss Win10, you'll get Win v. Next when you buy your next computer. If Windows is around anymore. Weird thing: when you can't give something away for free you start to ask yourself why you're spending R&D on it.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by Sitten Spynne View Post
    Weird thing: when you can't give something away for free you start to ask yourself why you're spending R&D on it.
    Makes you wonder how much they are anymore. Everywhere you turn they seem to be trying to make more inroads into using pieces and parts from Linux and even some Linux distributions. Before too long Windows may be a second-class citizen on Azure. That's what the open-sourced ".Net Core" is all about.

  29. #29
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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    That's sort of been my doomsaying prediction all 2016. The pieces on the board look a lot like MS might be making the bet that Windows isn't their future, but Office and Azure could be.

    That's a scary landscape because of how many businesses I know rely on Windows. The signs I wave and pamphlets I hand out may say "follow the cutting edge or fall by the wayside!", but I do feel horror at the concept of a few thousand small businesses suddenly losing any guarantee of stability for their mission-critical software.

    I imagine there's going to be some final release of a "Desktop Windows", that'll be expensive as heck to lease annually. Maybe some MS-branded OEM hardware that guarantees you'll be able to run it. Imagine that. Windows as a mainframe OS. 10 years ago I'd have laughed at such a theory. Now it seems like the only natural conclusion. If they don't release this... I almost wonder if they can survive the litigation it might inspire.

    It does raise an interesting topic: "At what point does a company become important enough it is ethically wrong for the company to dramatically change their product?"

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by topshot View Post
    I'll do the next attempt from a connected PC to see if that makes any difference.
    Happy to report that I believe my problem stemmed from d/l the wrong version of the ISO. Since his was a Home Premium edition, I choose "Windows 10 Home single language" from the 3 available options since it was the only one that said Home. Further research indicates that is only for Win 8/8.1 upgrades, which I never would have guessed. I figured it meant it gave you only English. Anyway, choosing just "Windows 10" was the proper option and it will install either Home or Pro. I used it to get my entitlement on my laptop (which I then re-imaged back to 7) and 2 other PCs (one also Home Premium) and never had to enter a key. My only trouble has been an avast scheduled task causing it to fail at the end so I have learned to uninstall it first before trying to upgrade.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by dilettante View Post
    Hmm... I'm still not sure that anyone has said whether this upcoming sunset on the free offer will (a.) get them to jump on it, or (b.) not make a difference in their plans.
    I'd determined when they first came out with the offer to hold off until now so they could work out as many bugs in the system as possible. I'm not at all thrilled about the all or nothing updates given their poor history of bad patches so I'm leaving only non critical PCs on 10. The rest I'll get the entitlement just in case and continue to use 7 until its support ends most likely.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by topshot View Post
    The rest I'll get the entitlement just in case and continue to use 7 until its support ends most likely.
    That isn't clear, to me at least. I was pretty sure that unless you converted an eligible Product Key (most editions of Win7, 8, 8.1) by the sunset date that you lost the option to upgrade after that without paying for a full retail license with a new Win10 Product Key.

    Is there some option to cliam the upgrade and defer installing it?


    No Sticker

    This is about PCs that ship with Win10 preinstalled by the OEM:

    A separate but somewhat related issue is that quite a lot of hardware in the post-Win7 era shipped with preinstalled OEM Windows but no COA or sticker or anything. If you try to reinstall using a download as ISO or bootable flash drive... you have no Product Key so you can't activate it.

    The story I got from an OEM is that you must restore-install from the restore partition or a restore disk you create on the system before it goes belly-up in the first place. The key and activation is baked in.

    You can probably extract the OEM Product Key from the registry, but once again you'd have to do this before you get into trouble.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by dilettante View Post
    Is there some option to cliam the upgrade and defer installing it?
    No, I'm upgrading to get the key and then restoring my Win 7 image as mentioned in post just before that one.

    The story I got from an OEM is that you must restore-install from the restore partition or a restore disk you create on the system before it goes belly-up in the first place. The key and activation is baked in.

    You can probably extract the OEM Product Key from the registry, but once again you'd have to do this before you get into trouble.
    Yeah, it's written into BIOS or something like that on some Win 8 machines. Never had to worry about that thankfully.
    Last edited by topshot; Jul 3rd, 2016 at 12:37 PM.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Quote Originally Posted by topshot View Post
    No, I'm upgrading to get the key and then restoring my Win 7 image as mentioned in post just before that one.
    Ok, I missed that. But are you sure if you revert back to Win7 during the rollback period and then wait for the offer to expire you can upgrade for free after that?


    Quote Originally Posted by topshot View Post
    Yeah, it's written into BIOS or something like that on some Win 8 machines. Never had to worry about that thankfully.
    Well it sure isn't in the BIOS, because I already ran into that. It seems to be embedded in the OEM restore image.

    That makes me think that once you have "upgraded" a Win8.x machine to Win10... down the road if you have to do a clean install you have no Product Key and will have to acquire a whole new Win10 license. Of course if you have a COA sticker or maybe retrieved the product Key from the registry before the machine went belly-up you'd be ok. As I said though, a lot of new PCs don't have a sticker anymore.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Hmm, it might be in a Trusted Platform Module though. Maybe I zapped it by allowing an install to write over it?

    We'll see, I'm in the middle of trying a restore again. I'll come back and post whether it will activate or not this time.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    No luck, it fails to activate. I guess using the downloaded ISO/flash option has pitfalls of you don't have a COA sticker with a Product Key on it.

    At this point I can't even retrieve the OEM Product Key because it isn't on the machine. Just forked over more $$ for OEM restore media. I'm hoping that solves the issue but at this point a whole new Win10 license may be needed. Grr.

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    The clock is ticking... anyone done any further hard thinking on this?

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    I'm not updating my development machine, I did update my laptop. Most of my clients are still on Win 7. I usually buy a new machine @ every 3-4 years. So I'll be buy a new machine in 1-2 years, it will come with Win 10 and I have my old machine to support any clients that are still using Win7.

  39. #39
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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    Same here. I'll wait for my next workstation at this point...

    I still have the XP workstation I used a long time ago for supporting old VB6 apps.

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  40. #40

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    Re: July 29th Free "Upgrades" End

    So it sounds like most people here at least aren't worried about "losing" the money. I suppose we don't really even know what upgrade pricing will be after the deadline, and it may not be enough to get in a panic over and risk a flawed upgrade anyway.

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