Upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 10 Pro - Free and Legal

Support for Windows 7 formally ended a week ago (Jan 14th) and there must be many members concerned about the ongoing security of the OS and rightly so.

One solution is to upgrade to Windows 10 and surprisingly this upgrade from Microsoft is both free and legal ..

See this post by Ed Bott ...

Here's how you can still get a free Windows 10 upgrade

I can confirm that it works and I now have an activated copy of Win 10 Pro on my second desktop which formerly ran Windows 7. The upgrade went without a hitch and was automatically activated with a digital licence!

 

If you tried it when the offer was initialy made but it failed due to hardware compatibility issues, then try again.

I made my first attempt in early 2016 with Windows 10 version 1511, just to get an activation on my system. I was disappointed because a lot of drivers were missing and I was actually surprized that the upgrade had completed. I restored my Ghost Image of Windows 7 and thought no more about it, until now with the neck of Windows 7 on the chopping block.

I tried again this week and went directly from a fully updated Windows 7 to Windows 10 version 1909. I did it online from installation media (USB-stick) created by the Media Creation Tool (not the Update Assistant) and the installer downloaded a bunch of updates. When the upgrade was completed, the first runs of Windows Update took care of most of the driver updates but a few had to be done manually through the entry in Device Manager. Even the drivers for the printer/scanner were updated and the only issue was that, due to incompatibility, the AMD Catalyst Control Center had been uninstalled but I downloaded and installed a version compatible with Windows 10.

My BOAC (Box Of Assembled Components) was built in early 2011 as a dual boot with XP and W7 based on the motherboard Gigabyte GA-870-UD3 and a 3 GHz AMD Phenom II X4 945 processor. Gigabyte don't supply any drivers for Windows 10 but it seems like AMD and others do since Microsoft offered compatible drivers, most of them signed by "Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher".

I'm quite satisfied and the next step is to clone the original HDD to a new SSD which hopefully won't interfere with activation but give me a "new" system.

 

My system is up and running on a Samsung SSD. I used Terabytes IFL for the cloning operation. There is a 30-day free trial version.

The system is still activated.

On the original Hitachi HDD, the time from boot to desktop was 41 seconds. On the new Samsung SSD time from boot to desktop is 21 seconds, approximately twice as fast.