Free In-Place Upgrade from Windows 7/8/8.1 to 10 - When was your most recent one?

[britechguy]

Hello All,

I know that most of us here believe that Microsoft is never actually going to pull this capability, but it would also be helpful to keep track of when people have last successfully done one, and particularly from Windows 7 to Windows 10 since 7 is officially out of support.

I'm starting this topic mainly as an ongoing list where folks can mention that they've done one. I haven't recently, I think my last one was pre-Covid and shortly post EOL date for Windows 7.

 

[alexsmith2709]

About a month ago

 

[sapphirescales]

I've only done a handful of "upgrades" in my life. It's always best to start with a fresh install whenever possible. That being said, I used a Windows 7 key to do a fresh install of Windows 10 yesterday. The system wasn't really compatible with Windows 10 and would freeze up after 20 minutes, but it activated okay. Went back to Windows 7 and the system works fine. I guess it's going in the junker.

 

[HFultzjr]

1 week ago.

 

[River Valley Computer]

Not many BUT........most come from customers who have software that is not still available. If you do an 'upgrade' you can preserve the programs. Don't get me wrong but it does help in certain circumstances. Our choice to to SAVE, N&P.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I have a Win8 Lenovo on my bench to upgrade, but before I can even attempt it I need to find a larger SSD for it. It's got a Samsung device in it I can't get solid details on, so it's waiting until I have time to take the bottom off.

 

[britechguy]

Well, surprise surprise!, I'll be the contrarian again. I have had issues on but one machine of all of the ones I've done in-place upgrades on.

Because most of my clients have years of existing files and scads of existing programs installed, often without installation media for putting them back on again, I only do Nuke and Pave installs as an absolute last resort. My standard practice is first to do an in-place upgrade, then if, and only if, the system simply isn't working as one would expect it to, going to a completely clean reinstall of Windows 10 afterward. This has been serving me well since 2015.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@britechguy You're not contrarian to me, I've upgraded hundreds of machines. Yes, some of them got weird later and needed a N&P, but that's a minority of units by far.

The only thing I find jarring about the process is punching into a machine and seeing a Win7 label on C.

 

[fincoder]

In-place upgrades have been very reliable for me too. Done it dozens of times with almost no issues. And most recently last week.

During the initial Win10 release period when it was pushed onto so many users, there were plenty of issues to deal with. Maybe the process was a little less reliable then but it also might have been simply due to the sheer numbers of upgrades.

 

[britechguy]

Well, I said it back in 2015 and it still applies today: If you don't have a stable and "reasonably well maintained" Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 then you should not expect that doing an in-place upgrade will result in anything other than an unstable Windows 10.

You cannot build a new house on quicksand and expect it to remain on solid footing.

I saw a lot of what I call "stupid, last ditch upgrades" where people doing so thought that this would eliminate all of the issues they'd been having with their existing Windows, whatever version it was. It just doesn't work that way.

 

[fincoder]

It just doesn't work that way.

It would be more accurate to say it doesn't necessarily work that way. A repair install of Windows 10 (in-place upgrade to the same version) is a well known way to fix OS glitches, so it isn't out of the question that the same thing could occur upgrading from 7 or 8. And a clean install can always be done afterwards as a plan B.

 

[britechguy]

To be clear, I was referring strictly to an in-place upgrade from an earlier Windows version.

I have posted these instructions, Doing a Windows 10 Repair Install or Feature Update Using the Windows 10 ISO file, for dealing with systems already running Windows 10, and into which one can, at the very least boot, on many occasions and on many online forums.

The two situations are apples and oranges.

 

[GTP]

I'm still doing Windows 7 to Windows 2004 upgrades on a weekly basis.
I do at least 1 per week, sometimes 2~3.
The only problems I have are that sometimes old software - like Adobe Photoshop and versions of Office (2003, 2007) "deactivate" and wont activate afterwards.
I've tried the various "Activation Backup " tools and tricks found on Google with varying succsess.

Otherwise its pretty straightforward.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I just took a Lenovo Ideapad Yoga 11S from Windows 8.1 Home to Windows 10 20H2 Home this afternoon.

Only headache was getting the Realtek Bluetooth drivers to stay gone long enough to allow the upgrade to install. I wound up deleting all the RTL* files in c:\windows\system32\drivers to get it to go.

After it came up on Win10 activated Windows installed workable drivers and off it went.

 

[lan101]

I have a lenevo m92p from 2013 that had win7 pro on it. I finally decided to upgrade that a few weeks ago. The 2004 version of win10 kept failing so I tried 1909 version and that went through fine. Just seen yesterday in the updates that it would let me know when 2004 version was ready for this system.

Runs basically as good as 7 did on a samsung ssd. I did shut some things down through the shut up windows 10 tool as well.

 

[HCHTech]

Although we primarily did N&Ps, we have a commercial client that we did upgrades for last year because they didn't want to pay for N&Ps. About 15 workstations in a workgroup. I have had problems with my RMM scripts for them ever since. Constant but random cscript errors, etc. I've tried a bunch of things, but more or less just accepted this will be a problem until they get new machines in a year or so. Other than that one exception, I'd agree with the others that I've had few problems with the upgrades we did.

 

[tchurlik]

About 2 weeks ago. Installed and upgraded with no issues.

 

[Satman]

Just yesterday. An older Dell core 2 duo with 4 gb ram concurrent with a SSD upgrade. It had a pretty minimal install on it, primarily used in a customers man cave and model railroad room for internet and media. All seemed to function properly after with no problems with upgrade or activation.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@Satman Careful with the Core 2s, the Intel integrated graphics don't have a driver, and while MS sort of provides one from time to time it gets screwed up and only a N&P can fix it.

If you run into it, just get a cheap graphics card. My bench machine is a Core 2 Quad Q6600, with some grap MSI graphics card in it, works fine.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

We've done probably...1500+ "in place upgrades". Very...very rarely had a problem. Can probably count the problems on one hand....was a very reliable and smooth upgrade.