Reply to post: Will pirates bother "warm" upgrading to Windows 10 anyway?

Will pirates bother "warm" upgrading to Windows 10 anyway?

I always have a policy of cold installs of OS'es (after backing up what I want to keep) instead of "warm" upgrades regardless of whether it's a server, desktop or laptop. That way, you start from a fresh slate and restore back only what you need onto the clean new OS, leaving behind unwanted crud from the older OS.

So surely if pirates have Windows (of any version, even XP) and want to go to Windows 10, wouldn't they just backup stuff they want to keep, cold install a pirated copy of Windows 10 and restore their backed up data? This would make the whole pirate upgrade issue in this article somewhat moot...