New
#1
Will this plan work to "reserve" my free upgrade permanently?
I have 4 retail versions of Win7 running on various machines in my house. I do not really want to upgrade to Win10 yet, but I also don't want to miss out on 4 free upgrades, and the time counting down until 7/29 has been bothering me. But I have a plan that I think might permanently extend my deadline. I'm curious what others think of this plan, although I also understand that nobody here can speak directly for MS, and their policies around this upgrade also seem to change quite frequently.
For each of my machines, perform the following steps (each step is supposedly possible from my research, please correct me if I'm wrong at any of them):
1) Take a spare formatted disk, put it in that machine, install Win10 using that machine's Win7 key.
2) Harvest the key from the Win10 install using one of many tools. Now I have 1 new Win10 key.
3) Remove the disk, format it, and let that machine continue using its previous Win7 install on its main disk.
4) Repeat steps 1-3 with remaining machines.
Now I have 4 new Win10 keys.
The 7/29 deadline seems to be for the act of performing the upgrade (and thus securing your 10 key). So I guess the viability of this entire plan hinges on the assumption that once a key has been secured, there is no "minimum use" requirement dictating how often I should use it. I.e. that if year from now I finally decide to do the upgrade for real, then all 4 new keys that I harvested will still work then.
Thoughts? (Please refrain from trying to convince me to just upgrade now... MS has that covered )