what happens after 29 July

Toby43 · 07 Mar 2016

What happens after 29 July 2016 if you have to (or just want to) reformat a machine that either had windows 8 preinstalled (the case with my laptop) or had an OEM windows 7 home premium disc (my desktop). Out of curiosity could I reformat and revert to windows 7 on the desktop and subsequently change to windows 10 again at an even later date (i.e. post 29 July)?
I can’t imagine ever going back to windows 8.1 on my laptop but I believe that if I use the Asus restore function, I go back to windows 8.1 AND all the ASUS bloatware. Would a clean install be the best way of proceeding on either machine and could I safely delete all existing partitions and let the OS create whatever is needed during installation? Again, I’m not sure about the position post 29 July.
Asus does not support windows 7 on the F555L laptop (although other contemporary Asus laptops were preinstalled with windows 7). Again, out of curiosity, could a full retail version of windows 7 be loaded onto a F555L or does the absence of an Asus chipset or other driver make this an impossibility?

CountMike · 07 Mar 2016

Windows 10 are registered to specific machine (Motherboard) so it doesn't matter if you revert to W7 as long as you have upgraded to W10 on same computer. Even after that date (unless MS changes something) you should be able to do clean install of W10.

alphanumeric · 07 Mar 2016

Once you do the free upgrade and activate Windows 10, a digital entitlement for that PC is stored on the activation server. From there on you can clean install that same version of Windows 10 on that hardware (PC) and it will activate with the digital entitlement. When asked for a product key you just click skip. You can go back to the original OS, I did it as a test to verify it was possible. I went back to my original Windows 8.1 Pro that I did the free upgrade from using the original 8.1 Pro key and it installed and activated just fine. I then did a clean install of Windows 10 Pro to verify that worked too. No problems.