Apparently Microsoft is still allowing free upgrades from Windows 7 to Windows 10

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CokeRobot :

Well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag…

I work at Microsoft and have been since before the Windows 10 launch. That whole “free” upgrade for a year was fully marketing fluff. After the cut off happened, the direction given was that it requires a paid license HOWEVER, this was brought up by the brick and mortar stores that they were doing simple clock changes on customer devices during the upgrade challenge to get around it and then ultimately it was clear two years later that anything Windows 7 and up would go to 10 fully activated and still to this day.

WDG didn’t care pretty much at all because Terry Meyerson at the time cared more about his upgrade stats than license revenue as Windows isn’t Microsoft’s cash cow anymore. It’s the same stance back in the day where Microsoft would allow Windows Updates on pirated copies of Windows 7 as the bigger picture was to thwart security threats based from those copies.

You still can do this no problem, however careful, do an upgrade keeping everything as if you choose to yeet everything and start fresh, you lose your free upgrade. That old 7 license converts to a 10 digital license and from there you can clean install no problem. As for audits, this mainly is for volume licensing than anything. An SMB with 10-200 Windows 7 machines that were OEM licensed don’t really matter. If you try this with 1,000 computers, iffy. At the end of the day, Microsoft had four years to close that loophole and never did so if worse came to worse, you could technically go through legal avenues as the EULA for 10 literally doesn’t have a clause for this at all. You can’t s*** on someone taking advantage of an activation workaround when you as the manufacturer never closed it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/e35i4i/apparently_microsoft_is_still_allowing_free/f92802f/

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TaskForce141

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So what does he mean by this?  Specifcally what does yeet mean here??

 

“however careful, do an upgrade keeping everything as if you choose to yeet everything and start fresh, you lose your free upgrade. That old 7 license converts to a 10 digital license and from there you can clean install no problem.”

 

 

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https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/eq9k0w/highlight_kyle_lowry_yeets_a_3/

 

^ watch the vid clip. That’s a yeet in basketball terms. Gives one an idea of what it would be like in computer terms. haha!

Group B for WIN7 w/ ESU, plus trying out Linux builds in dual boot.

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Many of my clients have been asking what to do now that support has ended for Windows 7. It is certainly true that the free upgrade provided by Microsoft is still available and works fine although it can take a couple of hours to complete. Just search for the Windows 10 media creation tool and then run the Update Assistant. Part of the process checks whether the computer meets the hardware requirements and on completion a list of things that are incompatible with Windows 10 are listed. I have now completed a lot of upgrades for my clients and one advantage is that the latest build 1909 is installed. As has been mentioned, there are ways to emulate the look of Windows 7 but I suggest that after a short learning curve it is better to move forward than keep looking back.

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