Free Windows 10 Upgrade for assistive technologies ends Jan. 16, 2018

cereberus said:

... It would not make sense to dispense of assistive technology if normal unofficial free upgrades continued.

Precisely - MS may well decide/remember to turn off the unofficial free upgrade at the same time - that's why this discussion is of more than 'academic interest'.

Bree said:

Oddly, so far this announcement hasn't reached the EN-GB version of that page - it currently says...

FAQ
When does the upgrade offer end?
We have not announced an end date of the upgrade offer for customers using assistive technology. We will make a public announcement before ending the offer.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/acce...ndows10upgrade

Not any more - it now says Dec. 31st.

cereberus said:

The point is MS have positively signaled the free assistive upgrade is coming to an end. The normal free upgrade has continued unofficially. It would not make sense to dispense of assistive technology if normal unofficial free upgrades continued.

I have a cunning plan to test that, come the beginning of 2018.

I have just bought a second hand 'Windows 7 Home Premium' Toshiba C650D laptop to use as a spare. After doing a factory reset to make sure it's 'clean' I checked to see if it had ever been upgraded to 10 and awarded a free digital licence. (there were signs of previous attempts to do so). The test was done by swapping out the HDD for a spare blank one and doing a clean install (skipping entering a key and making sure I installed Home, which is what it would get after an upgrade) then seeing if it would activate.

It installed OK (a few problems, but nothing that stopped the install completing). When looking at Settings > Activation it said it could not activate because there was no digital licence for this machine on the activation servers.

The problem was in the display driver, as soon as it had installed windows update downloaded a 'new' ATI driver to replace the Microsoft Basic Display driver that the install put in place. The atibtmon.exe that windows update installed crashed and the display (and everything else) stopped working - just leaving a mouse cursor on a black screen. The only way out was a hard reset. Turns out that Microsoft installed a 2006 version of the driver, but that's older than the 2009 one that came with Win7 (no wonder it didn't work). My guess is that's why it never earned a digital licence despite attempts to upgrade it. Windows update killed the system before it had a chance to register on the update servers. I'm sure I can get round that though - hiding the driver update or copying the atibtmon.exe for Win7 are a couple of possibilities, as is rolling back to the basic display driver.

So I have a one-shot chance to test if the free upgrade still works after 31 December. How long should I give it before testing, do you think?

cereberus said:

Of course if it does not work, that is not 100% proof eg Windows 7 key may be dodgy, you have issues contacting activation troubleshooter etc.

No, there's no doubt about the Windows 7 being genuine. Remember, it's running Toshiba's OEM Windows 7 Home Premium freshly reinstalled from the factory reset partition. As it happens, my main machine is another Toshiba and that too had Windows 7 Home Premium restored from the factory reset before successfully getting the free upgrade to 10 (fortunately it's a model that uses the Intel HD display).

Of course, you can still use 10 even unactivated indefinitely if it did not work.

If it doesn't work I'm happy to keep using Win7 on it (with all the Media Centre features that were removed in 10) so I'm willing to take that risk. Anyway, I wouldn't want to violate the EULA :)

I think I'll wait 30 days, that seems to be a number MS use by default for most things...