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Installing Win10 after the free upgrade period ends
Hello,
This is my first time here and couldn't find an answer after a few minutes of searching. Sorry if this has been asked already...
Anyway, I have an HP laptop that came with windows 8 and has a ~20Gb recovery partition that re-installs Win8 and all the bundled software. After I upgraded to Win10, I made a recovery drive. When creating the recovery drive it asked for a 32Gb USB drive which I provided and it seemed to work fine. I later used the recovery drive to re-install windows; but, it was windows 8 again. I then had to download and install the free upgrade again. What will happen if I want to re-install win10 after the free upgraded period ends? Will the upgrade still be available from somewhere as long as I have a hardware profile on an activation server? Or, maybe I have to do something different when creating the recovery drive? I'd really rather not get stuck with Win8 in the future.
BTW, my PC at work was an upgrade from 7 to 10 and I made a recovery drive there also. That PC doesn't have a recovery partition and only required 4Gb for the recovery drive. Should I expect this drive to re-install win7 and require me to download 10 again also?
Thank you in advance for any information.