I seriously doubt M$ will charge for Windows 10 one year after the launch. All of this is just a publicity stunt to convince more people to quickly move on to Windows 10 and leave older OSes behind, consolidating the user base on the new OS. They didn't extend the offer to older OSes like XP/Vista because let's face it, if you're still on XP/Vista you'll probably never update and/or you don't have the right CPU features for 8.x/10, and if you're still with Vista and didn't take advantage of the low upgrade offer to Windows 7 or 8.x, you probably also won't be interested in Windows 10. Their OS revenue has dropped 16% over the last 2 years but Bing and games revenue has increased 15% so their strategy has to change, charging for an OS is no longer a viable option mainly due to competition like Google's Android and Chrome platforms being free. Only time will tell, but for now it's better to reserve a Windows 10 license before they decide to charge for it once again...
That's how I upgrade all laptops that didn't originally came with 8.x: clean install of Windows 7, activate with certificate + key, upgrade with Media Creation Tool to Windows 10, verify it is activated in System Properties (win+pause), then clean install of Windows 10 from DVD/USB without entering any key, it will activate when first connected to the internet. A boring process, but that's how Microsoft wants it to be...
guess I forgot to finish what I started here.. So my above post works perfect. The system came with slic 2.1 and home premium, I upgraded with a pro retail key and did the Win10 upgrade. I used the currently installed Pro 7 installation for the upgrade and installed 10 Pro. It never seen the Home Premium. Pro retail key is still functional on another machine, 10 is activated on the home premium->pro system and clean installs and resets work perfectly without any key needed. Also, ran an 8.0 Core system with the OEM: DM key in the MSDM table, it was upgraded to 8.1 Pro via retail key as well, and Win10 Pro installed during the installation, same thing as above. All sweet. So for my runs, SLIC and MSDM are ignored if another system is in place before the Win10 upgrade. Of course most of us know this now, but I figured I should at least post my findings since I made the post above lol
Windows 10 doesn't care if you have SLIC or not, all it cares is if your Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1 are activated. That's why people without SLIC 2.1 in their BIOS were able to upgrade from Windows 7 SP1 activated with Daz Loader, it can't even tell if your computer came with Home Basic/Premium, Pro or whatever, as long as you're running an upgradable version
True. When it comes to SLIC though, Microsoft could never tell which particular SKU your computer came with as the SLIC table and certificate is the same regardless as far as I know. The only thing that determined the version you could activate was the product key used, and those were the same for all users.
I am confused. If you already upgraded from 7 to 10, and verified that it is activated, why another re-install?
Because some of us like clean installs. FWIW, for some reason the Edge browser did not load any web pages while I was using the in-place upgrade. It wasn't until the clean install that I was able to try it out. Then again, maybe a disabled Edge was a good thing...