8.1 to 10 - Still possible?

You can upgrade- but it's questionable as to whether you will find Win 10 activated for free.

On the one hand MS has closed that route off.

On the other, one member successfully upgraded 8.1 -> 10 and found it activated within the last 2-3 weeks.

But you can get Win 10/11 Pro licenses for $40 from reputable places (or maybe less).

That sounds like it may have been one of my posts. I did the Upgrade of a Dell Inspiron Notebook with a Celeron CPU running Win8.1 Home to Win10 by running the setup.exe on the USB Thumb drive I keep on hand. I did it Offline so as to avoid creating a Microsoft Account on it then after setup went Online to get updates and it automatically activated. On Wednesday I did the check for the Patch Tuesday updates and it worked with no issues.

The 8GB USB Thumb drive was made using the Microsoft MCT/Media Creation Tool process.
windows 10 media creation tool at DuckDuckGo

It was Home to Home. To change Home to Pro would require getting a license for Pro. And there's no advantage going from Pro to Home. The MCT USB Drive was made on Jan. 3, according to folder dates on the drive, but it is never fully up to date, always need to do that after install.

Edit: wrong date given, left off the 0, it was Jan. 30.

Note: poster already has Pro, so upgrading to 10 will give him 10 Pro.

@KingDing
- to consider- depending on how confident you are in what's on the PC (previous owner, how clean it is...) then you will need to decide whether to clean install Windows.

If you do manage to upgrade and activate successfully, a clean install should be a safe option.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...tallation.html

I suggest you build the USB Win 10 22h2 installation drive using MCT so it can boot as Legacy or UEFI.