It will accept a win 7 or win 8 license, or take an installed and licenced version of them as a valid starting point.
Why this is still the case after the official free upgrade period ended I don't know. It could be they had to leave scope for any that upgraded from earlier versions to be able to re-install, or perhaps as they are moving to an OS "as a service" rather than a product, it makes sense to give away the razor, and make money on the blades.
I think you can get away with a clean install in the first place. Just don't bother entering a win 10 key during installation, but then go back to the activation page after, and select the option to enter a new license and enter the Win 7 / 8 key then. (last time I tried it it worked ok in a "blank" virtual machine)
And that's my point, there is still quite a lot of 'Windows Only' stuff out there and so many people will need to have access to Windows for something. On the flip side very few people need Linux to do something *they* can't under Windows (most will have never heard of Linux of course).
;-(
Sure. I installed it on 6 office machines for a mate ... who then went out and bought 6 full copies of MS Office and used that instead because people were sending him stuff and he wanted to minimise any compatibility issues (and the chances are any business will be running a fair recent version).
Quite.
I would because I have yet to find anything that works as well as Forte Agent (Pan is close but no cigar and is very slow on a couple of PC's for some reason) and Irfanview has no Linux equal that I have found so far. I don't use iTunes myself but I do look after several Apple products for people and so do need access to it and then we have all the OBD tools and games ... one person used some Karaoke software that was Windows only (and the list really goes on ...).
Like I said, if you are a coder and / or just (mainly) use your PC as a web terminal / WP then Linux will probably be sufficient.
;-)
I upgraded the little PC I keep round Mums tonight to Mint 19.3 (I think it was). The tense moment was accepting the 'Recommended' graphics driver (as many times that has left me at some terminal prompt and I don't have the skills, time or interest to try to fix it so that often requires a complete re-install and a reminder not to touch the video drivers!
Daughter and I watched 3 episodes of 'Veganville' via iPlayer (Web) on Linux tonight and it worked fine (on low res, it's only a low powered mini box). ;-)
You certainly could, but I'm not sure I'd trust that now, when the free upgrade has supposedly ended. People are saying that an upgrade works and I'd be reluctant to try a clean install route, as it may sort the licencing in a different way.
I don't think in most cases there is any need to run 16bit apps now as all the main offenders long ago made them 32bit. I guess there might be a few almost dos level things floating about, but by far the biggest killer of xp was the loss of support for very popular amd chips, which meant that many bits of software will crash if one of those processors without the sse2 instruction set are in use. Brian
Well its not crap, its basically an extended 7, but the way its updated so major every six months is crap, as it means that you have to go through the hoops of backing up and restoring programs that will work but windows 10 does not want you to use. Bah Humbug. I guess windows like any shell system is a resource hog, but if you want the non tech folk to use a computer you have to dumb it down. Brian
It works fine but it depends. When I last upgraded (2013) I didn't have the time to self build the machine as normal so I bought a ready built one with Windows pre-installed. I update this to Win10Pro64 1903 last June. Compared to Win7, Win10 is significantly faster on the same hardware.
Major machine vendors (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.) have been building Windows licencing info in the BIOS to simplify their installation processes for years. It's why you could use the reinstallation media on these machines without being asked for the licence info as the installer was able to check the BIOS. You could reinstall the same version of Windows again but not a better version i.e. bought Win 7 Home 32 could not reinstall Win 7 Pro 64. To do that you'd need a new licence key.
MS called this originally Digital Entitlement and now Digital Licencing.
I lifted these rules from a website:
Windows 10 will use the ?digital license? (digital entitlement) activation method, if one of the following is true:
You?re upgrading a genuine copy of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 for free. You?ve purchased a copy of Windows 10 in the Windows Store and successfully activated Windows 10. You?ve purchased a Windows 10 Pro upgrade in the Windows Store and successfully activated Windows 10. You?re part of the Windows Insider Program and you have upgraded your genuine activated copy Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview build.
Windows 10 will use the product key activation method, if one of the following is true:
You have obtained a copy of Windows 10 from an authorized retailer. You have obtained a digital copy of Windows 10 from an authorized retailer. You?re using the Volume Licensing agreement for Windows 10 or MSDN subscription. You have purchased a new computer running Windows 10. Genuine copies
You can ask why MS is happy to allow people to get a new version for free. Replies will range from conspiracy theories of better monitoring of what people are doing to simple business of reducing the money spent on having to support so many different versions of Windows. And, the number of people competent to do an install or upgrade is not significant against the number who will just buy a new PC.
It was quiet painless. Took far less time than GParted took to shuffle my C,D and E partitions beforehand.
Now I am struggling to find the Windows 10 controls that existed in Win7 that allowed me to alter all the systems fonts used to control windows borders, frames, text displays etc.
I have even had to set Tbird to 'dark' mode to make it readable.
Well Win10 Pro/32 still runs Heatloss manager 1998 on my PC !, and Lightroom 3.6, Photoshop elements 9, Micrografx Picture Publisher 8 and Irfanview still work.
Windows 10 refused to play with an ATI front panel that came with the
2011 Gigabyte Motherboard and something else I had forgotten I had downloaded and that is it.
I had a look at the the Windows Event Log after upgrading to Win10 Pro/32 and all the logs had been cleared out and started afresh from the time that Win10 was installed.
the Applications log contains numerous events described as Win7-** !
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