Free upgrade during the first year

Emma · 23 Jan 2015

That is what I thought also. You go so far and you loose customers and it sounds like they are wanting happy customers. I think when I replied to that post I doubted it.

Thanks for confirming what I thought when I first read it.

ARC1020 · 23 Jan 2015

WightWalker said:

...But, what would happen after the 1st year when the free upgrade offer lapsed & your HD crashed with lose of OS.

I've never found backups of drives with Operating Systems too successful when restoring often with errors that require the installation disk to be inserted into the DVD drive.

Would you be able reinstall your original OS & then upgrade to Windows 10 for free again; I doubt it

It's the Product Key that's the important bit, not the actual Windows software itself. When you upgrade to the final version, that computer will then have a valid Windows 10 Product Key (Licence Key).

Going back to when I first upgraded to Windows 8, it was possible to get Windows 8 ISO's, but was a bit of a pain and you had to run through some hoops. However, Microsoft have since provided a tool called 'Windows Installation Media Creation Tool' that can be used to download Windows 8 ISO's. These ISO's can then be burnt to DVD or USB stick and used to [re]install Windows. I use the same DVD created from that ISO to install/re-install Windows on my own computers and also family computers (saves a 4GB download on every machine every time). As they're all 64-bit Windows 8.1 Pro, the ISO is the same for all of them, it's only their Product Keys that are different. There's no need to install your previous OS first either, just load Windows straight from the DVD/USB you burnt.

So, hopefully Microsoft will do the same for Windows 10 when it comes out and therefore you'll be able to just re-install from ISO if needed and use your Windows 10 Product Key to activate it. I guess we'll find out nearer the time, but I can't think of a reason why they wouldn't continue allowing people to download ISO's for [re]installation purposes.

I'm not a fan of cloning/disk imaging either. The problem with disk imaging software is you really need to create the disk image straight away on a clean, guaranteed infection free computer. That's fine, however software/drivers are constantly changing and updating, therefore that image soon goes out of date. Therefore, I just stick with a totally clean install from ISO and as all my files and software are on a seperate (and backed up!) hard drive anyway, it's just a case of re-installing the software from that drive, which doesn't really take long anyway. Each to their own though.

lehnerus2000 · 23 Jan 2015

adamf said:

If you say when you restore from your backups it is not successful you really need to try another method. I make backups a lot and they ALWAYS work - it would be pointless otherwise. Certainly you don't need an installation disk to restore a backup.

You could try Macrium perhaps.

Sometimes glitches happen.

I was just playing around with a backup last week (Macrium).
I attempted to create a VHD from a verified backup image.
Windows booted successfully, but the keyboard didn't work (the mouse worked perfectly).
Also the on-screen keyboard would not open, so I couldn't log in.

I then attempted to restore the image to a spare HDD.
2 times out of 3 attempts the same thing happened.

I have also experienced boot failures after restoring an image.
Running Startup Repair would fix that issue, but that would result in Activation failure.
Restoring the same backup image a second time normally works.

Free upgrade during the first year

Glitches