"This free Windows 10 upgrade offer still works. Here's why -- and how to get it"

"This free Windows 10 upgrade offer still works. Here's why -- and how
to get it"

https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-f...how-to-get-it/

"More than three years after Microsoft’s free upgrade offer officially
ended, people are still reporting successful Windows 10 upgrades from
older machines. Here’s the latest extremely unofficial report."

Surely nothing could go wrong upgrading the ten PCs at my office running
Windows 7 x64 Pro.

Lynn

Lynn McGuire wrote:
"This free Windows 10 upgrade offer still works. Here's why -- and how
to get it"

https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-f...how-to-get-it/


"More than three years after Microsoft’s free upgrade offer officially
ended, people are still reporting successful Windows 10 upgrades from
older machines. Here’s the latest extremely unofficial report."

Surely nothing could go wrong upgrading the ten PCs at my office running
Windows 7 x64 Pro.

Lynn


Isn't it a little late in the cycle to be throwing
a barb like this ?

It's only ten machines, but you're going to hate
that you didn't work on this in advance.

You can (for W10-over-W7 install):

1) Back up the entire drive C: is sitting on.
Even though install has "Revert", it doesn't
work good enough for government work. If you
hit a snag, restore from backup, as it's faster.

2) Load the DVD in the tray. Navigate to the
top level and run Setup.exe.

3) When the decompression/copy phase is complete,
the optical media can be pulled out of the tray
on the first reboot. You can then move to the
next PC and run Setup.exe and kick that one off.

4) After the fourth or so reboot, the machine
will start asking you questions. These are questions
intended for Home users who qualify for Free Upgrades.
You should have account names and passwords ready
on hand, to answer the questions. The local account
option is on the lower left and dimmed out a bit.
If it keeps asking for an MSA as
a user name), pull the network cable so it can't
complete a Cloud transaction, and then it will
definitely allow a local account to be defined.

If you're not doing a W10-over-W7 install, there
is more to know. Clean installs require a bit
more preparation in advance.

The install will stop early, if the CPU is not
instruction-set-compatible. There is one Intel
Pentium processor, whose part number begins with
G, that is actually compatible, but because of
an error in the CPUID instruction encoding, it
returns a result which says it won't work with
Windows 10. This means that even a two year
old machine can fail to install Windows 10.
Whether they fixed that one manually in 1909,
I don't know.

You can have one copy of the ISO on your "server",
and use OSFMount to mount the ISO as a virtual DVD
drive, with this. This allows you to kick off
"Setup.exe" on all ten machines, in the same minute.
W8 and W10 have built-in virtual DVD drives, and
don't need a crutch like this.

https://www.osforensics.com/tools/mo...sk-images.html

*Make sure* you've worked all the details on how
accounts will be set up in advance. Sure, you can
use lusrmgr to set up accounts or whatever later,
but again, this is stuff you should test on at least
one machine install, to make sure it's going to work
out for you.

The machine will prompt for an MSA, such as a cloud



The home directory will end up "mynam" and
the user will *hate* this. If you want to make
the machine cloud ready, my guess is adding an
MSA later is the best route to take.

If you use a local account (my name is Bullwinkle
by the way), then the home directory will be full length
and under my control. My homedir will be
"bullwinkle". If I entered John Smith,
then the homedir ends up with a space in the
name, which is fine too. I just prefer the
thing as one name, and later, if the Mail App
wants to parse that and make "Bull Winkle" out
of it, I really don't care.

Paul

Paul wrote:

If I entered John Smith, then the homedir ends up with a space in
the name, which is fine too.

Which having spaces in usernames makes user-level security on network
shares a real PITA. You would think MS would follow other OS's and a
username generated from a fullname "John Smith" would be a more reasonable:

john

johns

john_smith

johnMACHINENAME

....

anything but "John Smith"


--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Paul wrote:

If I entered John Smith, then the homedir ends up with a space in
the name, which is fine too.

Which having spaces in usernames makes user-level security on network
shares a real PITA. You would think MS would follow other OS's and a
username generated from a fullname "John Smith" would be a more reasonable:

john

johns

john_smith

johnMACHINENAME

...

anything but "John Smith"

It's pretty obvious Microsoft wants us to learn the
gentle art of "quoting stuff" to insulate. An OS
isn't an OS unless you've got "\"\" multilevel quotes "\"\"
around everything :-) When they weren't sure
"John Smith" would be a nuisance, they threw
in a "My Documents" to make sure. Oh, and
a "Program Files".

Paul

Paul wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Paul wrote:

If I entered John Smith, then the homedir ends up with a space in
the name, which is fine too.

Which having spaces in usernames makes user-level security on network
shares a real PITA. You would think MS would follow other OS's and a
username generated from a fullname "John Smith" would be a more
reasonable:

john

johns

john_smith

johnMACHINENAME

...

anything but "John Smith"

It's pretty obvious Microsoft wants us to learn the
gentle art of "quoting stuff" to insulate. An OS
isn't an OS unless you've got "\"\" multilevel quotes "\"\"
around everything :-) When they weren't sure
"John Smith" would be a nuisance, they threw
in a "My Documents" to make sure. Oh, and
a "Program Files".

They finally dumped "My Documents" bs with a legacy link, but still
persist with "Program Files" and now added insult "Program Files (x86)".
I guess "c\programs" and "c:\programs32" with legacy symbolic links was
just too much to ask for.


--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Lynn McGuire wrote:
"This free Windows 10 upgrade offer still works. Here's why -- and how
to get it"

https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-f...how-to-get-it/


"More than three years after Microsoft’s free upgrade offer officially
ended, people are still reporting successful Windows 10 upgrades from
older machines. Here’s the latest extremely unofficial report."

Surely nothing could go wrong upgrading the ten PCs at my office running
Windows 7 x64 Pro.

Lynn


I updated 3 this week, 2 with Windows 7 Pro, and 1 with "Home Premium",
and nothing really went wrong. Did it take some time to reconfigure the
machines and learn a bit about Windows 10: Yes. The upgrade is the easy
part; for the most part, you don't even have to watch. While I was
upgrading my second one, I went to the grocery store--came home and it
was "done".

Lynn McGuire wrote:
"This free Windows 10 upgrade offer still works. Here's why -- and how
to get it"

https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-f...how-to-get-it/


"More than three years after Microsoft’s free upgrade offer officially
ended, people are still reporting successful Windows 10 upgrades from
older machines. Here’s the latest extremely unofficial report."

Surely nothing could go wrong upgrading the ten PCs at my office running
Windows 7 x64 Pro.

Lynn


https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...load/windows10

You want the upgrade assistant. It's free.

On 12/30/19 6:50 PM, Paul wrote:
TheÂ*machineÂ*willÂ*promptÂ*forÂ*anÂ*MSA,Â*suchÂ*a sÂ*aÂ*cloud



TheÂ*homeÂ*directoryÂ*willÂ*endÂ*upÂ*"mynam"Â*and
theÂ*userÂ*will *hate*Â*this.Â*IfÂ*youÂ*wantÂ*toÂ*make
theÂ*machineÂ*cloudÂ*ready,Â*myÂ*guessÂ*isÂ*adding Â*an
MSAÂ*laterÂ*isÂ*theÂ*bestÂ*routeÂ*toÂ*take.

IfÂ*youÂ*useÂ*aÂ*localÂ*accountÂ*(myÂ*nameÂ*isÂ*Bu llwinkle
byÂ*theÂ*way),Â*thenÂ*theÂ*homeÂ*directoryÂ*willÂ* beÂ*fullÂ*length
andÂ*underÂ*myÂ*control.Â*MyÂ*homedirÂ*willÂ*be
"bullwinkle".

This is worth noting for everyone. My first install of the Insider
version the first week it was out I did the MSA thing and got that
stupid home dir name.

Ever since I've started with the local account so the home dir comes out
as 'alan'. I have a lot of scripts etc that think the home is
C:\users\alan, so the MSA just puts one big load of work on my back. I
never could understand why MS couldn't ask for your home folder name.

Al

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Mon, 30 Dec 2019 23:53:09 -0500, "Jonathan
N. Little" wrote:

Paul wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Paul wrote:

If I entered John Smith, then the homedir ends up with a space in
the name, which is fine too.

Which having spaces in usernames makes user-level security on network
shares a real PITA. You would think MS would follow other OS's and a
username generated from a fullname "John Smith" would be a more
reasonable:

john

johns

john_smith

johnMACHINENAME

...

anything but "John Smith"

It's pretty obvious Microsoft wants us to learn the
gentle art of "quoting stuff" to insulate. An OS
isn't an OS unless you've got "\"\" multilevel quotes "\"\"
around everything :-) When they weren't sure
"John Smith" would be a nuisance, they threw
in a "My Documents" to make sure. Oh, and
a "Program Files".

They finally dumped "My Documents" bs with a legacy link, but still
persist with "Program Files" and now added insult "Program Files (x86)".
I guess "c\programs" and "c:\programs32" with legacy symbolic links was
just too much to ask for.

Any program that lets me choose where to put it, I put in c:\programs.
The guy I bought the compter from upgraded it from 7 to 10 and called
the owner "owner".
Data goes into C:\data. Documeents into c:\data\text or maybe
subdirs of finance, medical, Dan [my brother], etc.

Take a look at this if you want to upgrade from 7 to 10.

https://lifehacker.com/quickly-upgra...14#rssowlmlink
--
Bill

Brought to you from Anchorage, Alaska

Lynn McGuire wrote:
"This free Windows 10 upgrade offer still works. Here's why -- and how
to get it"

https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-f...how-to-get-it/

"More than three years after Microsoft's free upgrade offer officially
ended, people are still reporting successful Windows 10 upgrades from
older machines. Here's the latest extremely unofficial report."

Surely nothing could go wrong upgrading the ten PCs at my office
running Windows 7 x64 Pro.

Lynn

On Wed, 8 Jan 2020 09:31:15 -0900, "Bill Bradshaw"
wrote:

Take a look at this if you want to upgrade from 7 to 10.

https://lifehacker.com/quickly-upgra...14#rssowlmlink

I bought a Panasonic Toughpad from an online auction.
The hard drive had been erased but it has a Windows 8.1 OEM sticker.
I installed Windows 10 directly and it says it is validated with a
digital licence.