What is the best upgrade path for 8.1 to 10 pro

If you are going to buy Pro, why not just buy 10 Pro and skip the upgrade? The short answer is, what is the cheapest option?

Agreed, just clean install 10 Pro.

Hello popupctrl Welcome to the Ten Forums!

If you go from 8.1 Home to 8.1 Pro you will need to buy that first outright while the 10 Home upgrade is the only option for 10 you have now. If you change to 8.1 Pro then you can go for the 10 Pro edition as a free upgrade. Right now however you can go with 10 Home and call it a day for the free upgrade to 10 or buy the 10 Pro key at the MS store for the retail price unless upgrading 8.1 Home to 8.1 Pro and then going for the free upgrade of 10 Pro.

Those are your two options available for getting into 10 Pro. But know this is that once you upgrade to 10 the upgrade itself will likely need to be replaced afterwards by a clean install of 10 if found to be buggy!

Two ways to repair or replace the upgrade install once activated on your laptop are with two of the three guides for this.
1) Windows 10 ISO Download Windows 10 ISO Download - Windows 10 Forums
2) Windows 10 -Clean Install Windows 10 - Clean Install - Windows 10 Forums
and an alternative Upgrade to Repair type install 3) Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade - Windows 10 Forums

You will also notice I put these links in my own forum signature for people to be made aware of since I ran into issues with the initial upgrade attempts here with 10 and have to offer the caution about how things can turn out not so good when going to see the upgrade take place!

Another guide will take you through the steps on how to see a USB Installation Key made up using a 4gb usb flash drive turned into the Windows 10 installation media you will want to keep on hand for perhaps even the initial upgrade as well as tending to a repair install if needed if not a full clean install later. USB Flash Drive - Create to Install Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

Of course first off you will want to review the guide on how to perform the initial upgrade install seen at Windows 10 - Upgrade Installation - Windows 10 Forums

The guide seen there has the full chart showing the upgrade paths available depending on which edition of the previous version you are running.

If you upgraded to 8.1 Pro and then did the free upgrade to 10, you would get 10 Pro. It might be cheaper to do it that way. Depends on what the 10 Pro upgrade costs? It all boils down to convenience versus cost. Buying an upgrade version could require more steps to do a clean install at a latter date, versus just buying a full retail version.

If you still have the 7 laptop and that runs good then you could easily keep 8.1 on the new laptop and upgrade 10 over 7 on the old one to examine 10 side by side with 8.1 to see which you would want to stay with! That will provide the cross comparisons of three different versions of Windows. Plus you still have a full year until next July to download 10 free once you made your best choice on which way to go.