back to article It's FREE WINDOWS 10 time: 29 July is D-Day, yells Microsoft

Windows 10 will be coughed up by Microsoft on July 29, the company said on Monday morning – and Windows 7 and 8.1 users can reserve their free upgrade right now. Gratis upgrades to Windows 10 are pegged to last for 12 months, as previously announced by Microsoft. That gives you until the end of July 2016 to claim them. Also, …

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    1. dogged

      Re: Windows 10?

      You forgot 2K which was also good.

      And Vista wasn't rubbish - it just came supplied on a lot of terrible hardware.

      Pre SP1, XP was anything but good. I'd say fuckawful, actually. No security by default, firewall turned off, IE6 doing its awful, awful thing.... nope, can't think of a single good thing about XP at release.

      Basically, this whole "alternating versions" meme is bullshit.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Windows 10?

        We only remember the latter half of XPs life because it has lasted so very very long. I remember El'reg ranting about fisher price back in the day, talking about upgrading the old NT/2k business environment to XP ahh. The more things change the more they stay the same.

        1. jason 7

          Re: Windows 10?

          I also remember all the hassle of 60Hz issues in gaming in the early days of XP. Can't remember what it was exactly but it caused a lot of confusion in the early days.

          As mentioned Vista just got burnt through cheapskate OEM suppliers (it'll run just the same as XP with 512MB of ram won't it?) and lazy third party driver development.

      2. Arctic fox
        Windows

        @dogged Re:"Pre SP1, XP was anything but good"

        To be honest I would so far as to say that it only became seriously usable with SP2. However, I entirely agree that it was the pits (something the XP-fanbois have an extremely selective memory about) before SP1.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Windows 10?

        "Basically, this whole "alternating versions" meme is bullshit."

        It definitely worked with Star Trek films though.

        1. Michael Habel

          Re: Windows 10?

          "Basically, this whole "alternating versions" meme is bullshit."

          It definitely worked with Star Trek films though.

          So wait are your saying that Wrath of Khan sucked?

      4. GitMeMyShootinIrons

        Re: Windows 10?

        "You forgot 2K which was also good."

        True, but it was neck and neck with Millennium edition which was, shall we say, less good.

        1. Curtis

          Re: Windows 10?

          ME was only released because users saw "2000" and thought "Upgrade to 98!" MS hurried a release of a stableish XP beta to upgrade the accidental 2k installs for the terminally lost

          1. dogged

            Re: Windows 10?

            While that's true, it's Microsoft's fault (specifically the marketing department,as usual).

            They could have just called 2K NT5 (which is what it actually was) and avoided all those issues.

            1. dogged

              Re: Windows 10?

              Oh look, my downvoter is back! Thanks. My posts were looking a bit naked without your endless scorched-earth policy on downvoting literally everything I ever say.

              "prick" icon, please.

      5. RS232 4 Eva

        Re: Windows 10?

        Vista was rubbish. Even on a brand new gaming PC it was a constant pain in the neck. Put it this way it was bad enough for me to spend £50 on a Windows 7 pre-order.

        1. dogged

          Re: Windows 10?

          > Vista was rubbish. Even on a brand new gaming PC it was a constant pain in the neck

          No, it had UAC which probably irritated you and needed hefty hardware. Clearly your brand new gaming PC was underspecced.

      6. 142

        Re: Windows 10?

        > Pre SP1, XP was anything but good. I'd say fuckawful, actually

        But after the car crash that was Windows Me, it was a Da Vinci masterpiece..

      7. Tom 38

        Re: Windows 10?

        Pre SP1, XP was anything but good. I'd say fuckawful, actually. No security by default, firewall turned off, IE6 doing its awful, awful thing

        People have such short memories, when IE 6 first came out, it was fucking amazing - when compared to all the different vagaries of IE 5, 5.01, 5.1, 5.2 and 5.5. I swear to god, each one of them required a different hack to get right. Firefox (or as we called it back then, Phoenix), didn't really exist yet apart from a beta that no-one other than us geeks used, and we still had to support Netscape 4.

        Early XP was 2k with some extra candy, which was nice as 2k was NT 4 with USB and some candy.

        People still used 98 and ME for gods sake. Some perspective before denigrating XP!

      8. Chika
        Unhappy

        Re: Windows 10?

        Basically, this whole "alternating versions" meme is bullshit.

        Not to mention boring. Every time they wheel out a new version, somebody revives it.

    2. Michael Habel

      Re: Windows 10?

      2k - Good

      XP - Got better with age

      Vista - Got shafted by overly broad interpretations of Minimal Hardware OEM's took

      7 Actually fits the definition of "Good", MicroSoft never took it anywhere though post SP1... Oh how I'd welcome a simple post SP1 Rollup!

      8 & 8.1 - Brain dead from birth

      10 - Candy Crush... The death of Patch Tuesday's... The birth of Windows as a Service? What's not to dislike about this already?!

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Anyone seen Kingsman ? Remember those free sims Valentine handed out...........

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    I'll wait for SP1

    1. graeme leggett Silver badge

      I thought the idea was that there would be no SP1 (nor Win 11) as such, just a progression of updates/features/patches.

      1. wdmot

        @graeme leggett

        Exactly. So, I'll just wait for SP1 too.

    2. Michael Habel
      Joke

      I'll wait for SP1

      I think you got your Triangles missed up. I think you meant to use this this One instead.

  3. GregC
    Meh

    Like most others here I'll be adopting a wait-and-see approach, though even priced at £0 there's nothing that makes me think it would actually be worth the download. Yes, the Start menu is back - but the overall look and feel is still fugly to me. As for the other "highlights" - don't care about Cortana, don't care about Universal Apps, Edge is irrelevant for me - just all seems a bit meh, really...

    Maybe I'm just being miserable git on a Monday morning.

  4. Evoflash

    Loving the free upgrade

    Really pleased I can upgrade from 7 to 10 for free. Delighted in fact. Might even go for it straight away.

    I'm wild like that.

    1. dogged

      Re: Loving the free upgrade

      I have quite hard time seeing why anyone would wait past the free year, to be honest.

      Take a backup image, make sure you only write data to a non-system drive, install.

      If you don't like it, restore. Why not? It's not as if it's expensive.

      1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
        Thumb Down

        Re: Loving the free upgrade

        Time is money.

        Time to take the backup

        Time to install W10

        Time to find out that it is a POS

        Time to restore the backup

        At $150/hour then yes it does become expensive

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Loving the free upgrade

          But then you get the cost back through applying your experience - and billing - when asked to upgrade someone's computer.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Loving the free upgrade

          At $150/hour get someone else to do it for you.

          1. Darryl

            Re: Loving the free upgrade

            "At $150/hour get someone else to do it for you."

            Or at least give yourself some sort of 'friends and family' discount.

        3. Chika

          Re: Loving the free upgrade

          Time is money.

          Does that mean that time is evil?

          Time to take the backup

          Which some folk won't bother with because it takes time.

          Time to install W10

          Time to feed the fish.

          Time to find out that it is a POS

          Time to clean the tank.

          Time to restore the backup

          Time to swear like a sailor because you couldn't be bothered to take a backup (see above)

          At $150/hour then yes it does become expensive

          Is that the going rate these days?!?

        4. Evoflash

          Re: Loving the free upgrade

          How do you sleep when it costs you so much?

      2. Paul Shirley

        @dogged

        Unless there's no downgrade right and you've just surrendered the Win7/8 licence for the upgrade. Restoring an image may not be an option.

        1. dogged

          @Paul Shirley

          Historically, Microsoft have never "deactivated" a license key once you've used it to upgrade. Of course, that doesn't mean they can't do it and it doesn't mean they are incapable of doing something that stupid but in the 20 years since Windows 95, it has never happened yet.

          And just for anyone who thinks restoring an image takes too long - incidentally, if you think that you have no business being in this industry -

          http://www.howtogeek.com/75496/how-to-reinstall-windows-without-having-to-reactivate/

          1. Primus Secundus Tertius

            Re: @Paul Shirley

            @dogged

            I seem to recall that Microsoft, or the US Government, once disabled the Windows machines owned by whichever wicked government was wickedly ruling Afghanistan in those wicked times.

            True, MS are unlikely to bother a private individual who keeps himself inconspicuous, but corporations are another matter.

          2. Ken Hagan Gold badge

            Re: @Paul Shirley

            "Historically, Microsoft have never "deactivated" a license key once you've used it to upgrade."

            It's hard to see how they could. You have to be able to restore Windows after wiping the system and your restoration media will be for the previous version. Unless MS want a really big legal scrap from everyone who gets a rootkit in the next few years, you'd have to be able to restore that previous version. If MS then allow you to upgrade again to Win10, even after the first year has elapsed, then that's their decision. My guess is that they will, because that's less painful for them than supporting Win7+8 for the next few years.

          3. jason 7

            Re: @Paul Shirley

            Well I have a Dell with the bios update for 7 Pro and no license key (only for Vista) yet with Dell's Windows 7 Pro installed I got the "10 Upgrade" offer.

            I would guess these machines (and in effect most OEM machines) wont be affected by any license loss.

        2. DuncanL

          Re: @dogged

          You can roll back (assuming you're coming from Win 7 SP1 or newer via the in-place upgrade): https://techingiteasy.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/how-to-rollback-to-a-previous-version-of-windows-from-windows-10/

        3. Chika

          Re: @dogged

          Bullseye. In all that I've read and heard so far, this is one of the biggest reasons to be cautious about this.

          • How far can we go to maintain our previous installation in case the new one goes pear shaped?
          • If I were to use the licence for a Windows 7 machine but install W10 on a clean drive, could I drop back again if I don't like what I get?
          • What are the overall requirements for rebuilding should a W10 installation from free need rebuilding after the first year is up?
          I suspect (and certainly hope) that details like these will come forward before the release. What I don't want is a system that is effectively bricked because W10 didn't go in as planned yet I'm not allowed to drop back to whatever came before.

      3. hplasm
        Windows

        Re: Loving the free upgrade

        "If you don't like it, restore. Why not? It's not as if it's expensive."

        What was that old trotted out line... "... Linux is only free if your time has no value?"

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: If you don't like it, restore. Why not?

        Because you won't have a windows 7 key anymore, you "upgraded" it to a Windows 10 one..

        I have quite hard time seeing why anyone would want to downgrade to Windows 10 anyway, you seem to lose quite alot of things, for example Aero...

    2. harmjschoonhoven

      Re: Loving the free upgrade

      There is no free lunch. You will at least have to surrender a valid e-mail address to reserve your Microsoft® Windows 10.

      1. Fair Dinkum

        Re: Loving the free upgrade

        Spamgourmet.com to the rescue. been using it for tn+ years.

      2. Androgynous Cowherd

        Re: Loving the free upgrade

        Oh no you don't....

    3. Planty Bronze badge

      Re: Loving the free upgrade

      Good luck with that. Word on the street is that it's a one way trip. Once you upgrade to Windows 10, there is no way back. Your licence key is irreversibly "upgraded" from a Win7 licence to a Win10 licence. Conviently (for Microsoft), there is no way to buy Windows 7 licences any more in retai either.

      In other words, you didn't want to buy Metro, so this is a way to force the Metro on you, with no way back...

      1. dogged

        Re: Loving the free upgrade

        > Word on the street is that it's a one way trip. Once you upgrade to Windows 10, there is no way back. Your licence key is irreversibly "upgraded" from a Win7 licence to a Win10 licence. Conviently (for Microsoft), there is no way to buy Windows 7 licences any more in retai either.

        Word on the street is absolutely, irrevocably, and massively wrong then. Was "word on the street" spread by Bob Vistakin, perhaps?

        As others have linked here, Windows 10 actually has an inbuilt system for rolling back to your old OS version. "Word on the street" my arse. Word on Slashdot, maybe.

      2. Shufflemoomin

        Re: Loving the free upgrade

        "Word on the street". Can't get more of an ironclad source than that, can you? Unless you'd care to give us a source we'd actually believe?

    4. Chika

      Re: Loving the free upgrade

      Yeah, but I can imagine the rush to get it at the start. I can afford to wait a little until the initial rush dies down and the opening bug gambit has at least made itself known.

      Just remember; every new version of Windows had problems somewhere. Quite often it was driver issues and non-supported hardware, often it was all the problems of inherited code when you tried to upgrade, sometimes it was software incompatibilities, and we don't quite know about some of the new features that might go boobies up in a fully working environment.

      Of course there will always be those that insist on having the code on day 1 - these are important people as they do all the suffering through these problems which the rest of us can then pick up on when we finally get around to doing our upgrades.

  5. Robert E A Harvey

    Signed up!

    I'm going to let it do it ASAP. I never wanted 8.1 in the first place, and it can't be worse

    can it?

    1. jbuk1

      Re: Signed up!

      What exactly is wrong with 8.1 and please don't tell the start menu.

      What sort of IT professional has even used the start menu since one of the XP updates introduced the ability to search it.

      Windows Key + first few characters of program name, enter. Boom. Exactly the same in 8.1, 8, 7, XP SP2.

      I can't believe in 2015 people are still slowly navigating through a start menu. Painful.

      1. jonathan1

        Re: Signed up!

        Erm,

        <begin snark>

        Well, I pin the apps I want to use regularly, in either the start menu or the task bar. I mean who repeatedly searches for the same thing...

        </end snark>

        Everyone has their own way of doing something, all because you do it one way doesn't mean all other ways are less valid or wrong. Besides if you've been using the start menu since Windows 95...old habits die hard and all that. I was that guy who used to to turn off Aero just to make it 'classic' looking. I don't like change - he sobs rocking in the corner.. :o(. I've got over that now with a lot of love and theorapy.

      2. Paul Shirley

        Re: Signed up!

        "Windows Key + first few characters of program name, enter. Boom."

        Window Key + "readme" + expand the files results + try to guess without the help of a folder path which of the 28 files is the one I want. Yes, really helpful.

        That hierarchical menu Microsoft are so determined to take away is there for when search isn't good enough or when I can't even remember what the thing I'm looking for is called. An option you apparently don't need but that's NO REASON to deprive me of it.

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