Unable to reserve upgrade

Hello Solarman Don't even wait! I clicked the reserve a free copy back in June and saw two success emails come in one being the confimation and then a second stating the notification could take days or weeks and after now two weeks still no 3rd mail while the second mentioned "if not wanting to wait you can download....." and I had already done so on the 29th of July! How to Download a Windows 10 ISO File

You're going to want to read through the guide for how to download the correct edition as well as three choices of combination 32bit/64bit ISO or individual download of each kernel by itself if not using the immediate upgrade option in order to save the download for later use. Here I saved both Pro and Home in both 32bit and 64bit downloads as ISO disk image files for later upgrades on other machines as well as using other then the Media Creation Tool you need in order to go after 10.

Note this however you will need to see an upgrade on your machine or one of the previous versions of Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 and see the upgrade activated before you can see a full clean install of 10 there. You'll want to go over these two other guides once you start getting things going.
Windows 10 - Upgrade Installation

Windows 10 - Clean Install

Solarman said:

Thanks Teachermark. But if I dont keep trying how will I upgrade without having to be very technically knowledgeable.

This is why you want to get familiar with each guide to follow them step by step since they don't require you to be any type of a pc geek? The steps are easy to follow. But if you do have any storage drive without any OS on that it will need to be unplugged even with the upgrade install otherwise each attempt will fail. I found that out real fast here until going over the guide for seeing a clean install mention this but found it also effects the upgrade type install.

teachermark said:

First make sure that your existing OS (Windows 7) is legit.
Is it the 32 bit version or the 64 bit version.
(There are step by step guides on how to do this also!)

If I were you (taking into account your level of confidence in your abilities to do the upgrade) I would hold off with this upgrade or get someone to help you.

Not being rude, but I can see this being a disaster!

Well that's the thing! There are a few important factors and why the guides are mentioned here to begin with since those are layed out in the simplest way possible to see things done by someone with less experience but still will always be even for the OS Geek user at own risk. This is why the advice to back up everything you want to keep before even taking the first step is the usual advice given.

Solarman said:

Thanks Teachermark. But if I dont keep trying how will I upgrade without having to be very technically knowledgeable.

You don't need to be very technically knowledgeable to be able to upgrade without waiting for the Get Windows 10 to work on your machine. The tutorials you can find here explain things in a straightforward way and the upgrade ones have lots of screenshots, and you can always browse the thread and ask questions before you actually try it for yourself.

But what you DO need is to be able and willing to follow the instructions given in the tutorial.

I would suggest you hold off from upgrading for a while anyway. You have a year to do it, so why hurry? There are still buggy things in W10 that will be resolved in time. I have a Dell laptop and I can see (from the Dell forum) that people are having challenges upgrading. I'm happy to let others have the headaches and wait until things settle down.

And if you're upgrading from 7 to 10 you are going to see a lot of changes. It would be better to get familiar with the W10 system first so that, once you do upgrade, you don't get a moment.

And before you do anything at all follow the excellent advice already given and make a back-up of your current system. Then if things do go wrong you have options. If you're not sure how to make a back-up I would suggest you have a look on the Windows 7 forum where there will be a tutorial. It would also be worth checking that your copy of Windows 7 is eligible (you mention it being a second hand machine). Again there is information on the forum here that you can use to check.

So stop watching the spinning wheel and use the time more fruitfully to browse the forums here. You will definitely benefit from doing that.

And that is why another guide was written when outlining some of the initial problems I saw as well as what a good number of others were running into with the initial upgrade install with this new approach MS is trying out. How to Do a Repair Install of Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade

And once I did just that having also seen this type of repair install method used on previous versions the guide will help you get back running again if the first is found too buggy to work with. :) And of course one of the best ways to learn how to get past the problems often seen with upgrades is too get familiar with how to back things up as well as how to perform a clean install.

Did you know once the first upgrade is on you can perform the second upgrade right out of a temp install folder the 10 installer leaves behind? If you end up with a buggy upgrade but you can still get to the desktop ok you simply browse to the "C:\$Windows~WS" folder if not already cleaned off of the drive by running the DiskCleanup tool and open up "C:\$Windows~SW\Sources\Windows\setup.exe" double click on the set up file and be on the way!

On a second custom build here I use for testing purposes I first setup a Windows 10/7dual boot where the 10 clean install to the second primary wouldn't even acitivate since the upgrade hadn't taken place there. So the decision was made rather then tossing a temp install of 7 on the second primary wiping the 10 clean install I would run the upgrade on the 7 Pro installation since I have a full system image I could restore anyways.

So far the upgrade over that 7 installation has been found less buggy that seen over a fresh temp install of 7 Ultimate both 64bit by the way seen on main system! I simply went into the WS folder and ran the setup.exe file directly from there to see a strong upgrade come about.