Upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7 for Free  

Thank you Brink, appreciate the welcome and the answer (love your avatar, by the way).

Follow-up question, then, if I may: should I decide to go for a fresh install, what kind of account is created by default? Or perhaps I can chose if I want the first account of a fresh install to be user or admin?

Thanks again, lots of nice helpful folks here, from what I have seen lurking around before registering.

The Bostonian said:

... should I decide to go for a fresh install, what kind of account is created by default? Or perhaps I can chose if I want the first account of a fresh install to be user or admin?

It would best to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 first, in order to get activated with a digital license stored on Microsoft's activation servers. Once the PC has a digital license you can do a clean install of the same edition (Home or Pro) if you wish. You do not need to enter a key, it will activate from your digital license.


The first account created by a clean install is always an administrator. It has to be, otherwise you cannot administer your PC. You can then create as many additional users as you need. By default they will be standard users accounts, but you can then make them an administrator if needed.

You will be encouraged to sign in as a Microsoft account for the first user account, but the option is there (bottom left, in small print) to create a local account.

Thank you very much Bree, appreciate your quick answer too and the additional pointers.

Wow Brink, this new forum format is awesome, beautiful and seemingly functional as usual.

Thank you, I followed the steps in this tutorial last week and it still worked. I had some difficulty opening spreadsheets created in Excel 2013 with my purchased copy of MS Office 2013, but was able to get that straightened out with a tip from another website. Otherwise, everything worked smoothly. Very pleased to find the wealth of info available on TenForums.

Very Interesting - Thanks.
Before reading this I had read Computer Shopper December 2019 Issue and that states that the only way that you can do the upgrade from Win 7 to Win 10 for Free was by doing a fresh install. A friend of mine had a Win 7 laptop with reasonable spec so I thought I'd try it. I took an image first and then did a fresh install, it was a HP Laptop, so I chose a custom install and deleted all the partitions, I didn't really want all the HP bundled rubbish on there, I'm glad to say that it worked, Once the upgrade was finalizing it asked to log on with a Microsoft account ( I didn't notice anywhere on the screen about using a local account), so I just made one up as I'm not sure they want the laptop back, once logged on I created a local account and all went well.
It's nice to do a fresh install, means that you can delete partitions if you wish and I presume that it formats the drive as 1 partition, I guess you could delete any partitions afterwards, but my way just seems cleaner.
It's great to see that you can do an upgrade, I did think about putting the Win 7 Image on and upgrading that, but that seems a bit daft, I'm sure I can find someone else that will want Win 10.

Steve

stevec59 said:

...Once the upgrade was finalizing it asked to log on with a Microsoft account ( I didn't notice anywhere on the screen about using a local account)...

That seems to be a 'bug' (deliberate?) in the Home version only. Pro will allow you to set up a local account. Should you ever need to do a clean install of Home again, there are two ways to see the 'offline account' option. The first is simply not to connect to the internet while setting up. The second is to give it a bogus phone number, as described in Step 24 in this tutorial:

Clean Install Windows 10

Thanks Bree. I guess most are going to be home for those home users that bought them in Curry's or somewhere like that.
I enjoy trying things out, so I might try an upgrade for someone, first taking an image.

Thanks Again,

Steve