Microsoft’s free upgrade offer for Windows 10/11 ended July 29, 2016. The installation path to obtain the Windows 7/8 free upgrade is now removed as well. Upgrades to Windows 11 from Windows 10 are still free.
All good (?) things must come to an end. Maybe Windows 11 will end some day too.
All bad things has an end as well. This move was one of the sustaining arms of windows 10.
This summary seems to say two contradictory things: “Microsoft’s free upgrade offer for Windows 10/11 ended July 29, 2016” vs. “Upgrades to Windows 11 from Windows 10 are still free”; I don’t see how they can both be correct.
As I understand it, while the official offer and the annoying promotional popups ended, you could still get activated if you manually went through the upgrade process.
As I understand it: the Windows 7/8 to windows 10 (hence, now also 11) offer was ended, but windows 10 to 11 is not.
Activated a fresh W11 Pro install with an ancient old W8 key I had just yesterday.
Whatever you say MS. I’ll believe it when I see it.
+1
Just updated my retired workhorse 3kg acer, from 7 to 10, just to see if I can, upon reading this.
And I was able to.
Apparently this also broke the “HWID” method of activating (pirating) Windows 10/11
I’m confused. How many devices that supported Windows7/8 can actually run Windows11 ? Windows7/8 to 10 makes sense, but why does it matter if you can’t put windows 11 on your old Windows 7/8 PC? Windows 7 started in 2009. and windows 11 requires 2015-2017 or newer PCs in many cases. I know there are work arounds to run Windows11 on some slightly older PCs. I know there were people in 2015 clinging to Windows7 and wouldn’t touch windows 10. I’m not sure why they change for Windows yes give it away free with upgrade. Maybe its a good think, Maybe its just providing a loophole for individuals to get free upgrade while discouraging commercial operations. It just gets you thinking.
Many computers that shipped with Win7/Win8 are technically capable of running Win11. The cautions there are than you REALLY want an SSD and at least 8GB RAM. After that, if you don’t have at least an 8th-gen Core CPU then Virtualization-Based Security will either incur a performance hit or just be missing entirely. Lacking TPM 2.0 will cause Bitlocker to operate a bit differently behind the scenes. If there’s more than that, I missed the memo. Bypassing the install checks is trivial, just snag the Win11 ISO from Microsoft and use Rufus to create a bootable thumb drive with the right options. Click click click done.
I believe it’s mostly because of what @j0scher said, it breaks the HWID method to generate a “genuine ticket” and get an activation that looks legitimate to Microsoft and is permanently stored on their activation servers as a purchased license tied to the hardware. I won’t name the most popular source for this activation method, but according to their Telegram group it was confirmed that this is Microsoft closing a long-known loophole that they had been leaving open specifically to allow people with Windows 7/8 to upgrade to 10 for free. By ending this free upgrade offer (officially ended in 2016 but unofficially never turned off) they prevent HWID activations from succeeding.
Of course, other methods based on KMS still work and likely will unless Microsoft overhauls their entire volume licensing system. I think the only thing keeping them from requiring a paid 365 license for all Windows users is the outrage they would get from the Enterprise sector who are used to running their own KMS servers and handling licensing in-house.
It’s all moot for those of us who no longer rely on Windows for daily use and/or who obtained their license legally, but it seems to have made ripples in the darker corners of the computing world.