Reinstall free windows 10 upgrade?

[Homerboy]

My install of Win10 took a crap on me and I need to reinstall. Trick is, my install of 10 was a free upgrade when MS was handing them out for Win 7 users.

I have my Win 7 disk to install, but how do I upgrade to Win10 now?

 

[mxnerd]

If you already upgraded to windows 10, you can download Win10 ISO image from MS using another PC, burn it to a DVD or write to USB flash drive and install from either media.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

No need to install Windows 7 first.

If you have only one PC, then as usual, you should be able to upgrade to WIn10 through Windows Update.

Your machine info has been stored in MS database when you upgraded your PC.

 

[Puffnstuff]

All you have to do is skip each time it asks for a key and once it completes installing it will automatically activate itself based upon your registered hardware ID. Gone are the days of fumbling around for a key to do a clean install provided 10 was activated before on your hardware and I for one am grateful that they've incorporated this feature. I've clean installed several times on all of my pc's, tablet too, so this works out very well for me.

 

[PliotronX]

The license is tied to the motherboard, works beautifully without worrying about keys. If only windows update was as smooth...

 

[Puffnstuff]

The license is tied to the motherboard, works beautifully without worrying about keys. If only windows update was as smooth...

WU works fine for me but that damnable windows store is another story.

 

[Kaido]

My install of Win10 took a crap on me and I need to reinstall. Trick is, my install of 10 was a free upgrade when MS was handing them out for Win 7 users.

I have my Win 7 disk to install, but how do I upgrade to Win10 now?

Two options:

1. Do a reset (the Windows 10 "CD" is built into the OS now)

2. Download the USB installer (or burn a DVD)

When you install Windows 10, it registers your unique hardware ID to Microsoft's online database. Any time you re-install Windows 10 on that machine in the future, you can simply skip the license key entry & once you get online, it will activate itself automatically. As far as the reset goes, this is the basic procedure:

Settings > Update & Security > Recovery (tab on left) > Reset this PC ("Get started" button) > Remove Everything > Remove files and clean the drive

This will wipe everything off the drive & re-install a fresh copy of Windows 10. Alternatively, you can either burn a DVD disc or a USB install disc, but you really only need to do that if your Windows 10 install is completely borked or if you have a blank boot drive that you want to swap in. If, for whatever reason, you'd rather use your Windows 7 disc to install, you can still install the Windows 10 upgrade from here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows10upgrade