Windows 10 Anytime Upgrade Key Free

[Curtis Cassel]

Woweveryone is moving up to Windows 7. I'm looking forward, as IT Manager for the Hanselman Family, to upgrading everyone. New OS for all the cousins and uncles and what-not is always a highlight of my year.

Disclaimer: I don't work for the Windows team and I wrote this post in the dead of night completely off the clock on a PalmPilot so there might be no confusion about my motives. I'm just a techie dude who happens to work for the Big Blue Monster. This is not official anything and it's a blog. It's very likely wrong or complete nonsense. One day you'll show up and I'll have been fired, drawn and quartered and this site will be all 404s. That is all. I may start selling T-shirts containing my disclaimers in case they are in any way unclear.

Clean Install + Migrate: You can certainly "migrate" your settings from an old machine to a new one still doing a clean install. It's a clean install, but you're saving time by bringing lots of little things over like browser history, favorites, usernames, passwords, subtle settings. Either way, you've got choices.

In-Place Upgrade: You can also "upgrade in-place," meaning you're installing Windows 7 to c:\windows (or whatever) and it'll upgrading your Vista installation directly. Once Windows 7 is installed, you can do an "Anytime Upgrade," for example, taking Win 7 Home Premium to Win 7 Pro if you like.

There's a chart that explains this, but visually, it's too complex in my opinion. I stated working on a simpler one, then Ed Bott in his wisdom beat me to it. It's a truth table of sorts, and technical folks LOVE to collapse their tables. What may have made sense to the original designer is begging for refactoring by one of us.

The original table looks scary and sends a negative message. However, as Ed points out "Most Vista users will have clear and logical upgrade paths from their current edition to the same edition of Windows 7."

Basically, if you're going from whatever version of Vista you have to a similar (or greater) version of Windows 7, you're all set. You'll only need to clean install if you're going from a "high sku" to a lower one. Go check out Ed's chart or click on the image above and enjoy your upgrade!

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU) is an upgrade method offered by Microsoft and selected resellers for users who wish to upgrade their edition of Windows Vista by buying a license. As we talked about in our Windows 7 pricing post, WAU will also be available for Windows 7. Since May 2007, WAU packs have been sold at retail in North America, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific countries. That would suggest that there are WAU retail boxes for Windows 7, right? Correct, as pictured above, Aero XP has managed to grab a few snapshots of them and confirm that the "full version boxes carry the same dimensions as the current Vista boxes."

If the boxes seem familiar, that's because they were leaked last month. We thought they were normal upgrade boxes and were suspicious about how different they looked from the Windows 7 retail boxes that were confirmed earlier this week. Now it all makes sense: they're simply WAU retail boxes for Windows 7.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Ars that WAU for Windows 7 could be purchased via two separate channels: "You can buy WAU options at retail or online." However, Microsoft is still holding back on pricing: "As with previous Windows operating systems, we know customers are often interested in upgrading to a richer experience by purchasing a higher SKU via Windows Anytime Upgrade," the spokesperson told Ars. "We can confirm that we will be offering anytime upgrades for Windows 7 and will be providing full details of Windows Anytime Upgrade pricing in the future."

A tipster tells us that WAU for Windows 7 might not end up being offered in retail stores in the US and other developed countries. Only regions where broadband access is extremely limited or unavailable will have the WAU retail boxes offered. This is unlike Vista, which required the actual disc to perform the upgrade from edition to edition. Since Windows 7 does not require a disc to perform an upgrade from edition to edition, most users will be able to simply pay for the key online and perform the upgrade. In short, you may not end up seeing the WAU retail boxes for Windows 7 after all.

I have a mid-2011 iMac, 27", running OS X 10.10.4 (Yosemite) and I recently reinstalled Windows 7 after the previous Windows 7 installation, which was about four years old, became unstable and crashed. I'm also running BCA 5.1.4, and when I reinstalled Windows 7 I had a USB drive with the most recent Apple drivers for Windows (just downloaded for the Windows 7 reinstall) plugged into the machine, so presumably I am running the most recent drivers for this machine.

Regarding the Windows 10 upgrade, normally I am not an early adopter of anything; in this case, my intent was to download the installer and wait until Apple released El Capitan. I figured the possibility of avoiding a future purchase of Windows 10 made it worth attempting. However, when I clicked "Yes" on the "Try Windows 10" popup that I kept getting, I had no idea they would be delivering this upgrade via Windows Update, and there would be no easy way of stopping it. Even hiding the update would not prevent it from downloading, and their promise that I could download and install later really amounted to anytime in the next two days. There was no other option presented.

I'm happy to report the upgrade appears to have went off without a hitch. It wasn't a clean install, but rather an upgrade from W7. I was quite surprised at how painless it was, actually. When I had completed the installation, I was momentarily speechless to find that all my software appeared to be intact, and it seems that I can basically pick up where I left off with my W7 reinstallation. It's the first time that's ever happened in my experience; in the past when I have upgraded Windows, I've reinstalled everything.

In any case, they promised I'd get a free copy of W10 Home Edition, but I was upgrading from W7 Ultimate, and it says I now have W10 Pro. So far, so good; I'm posting this from my new W10 installation.

I tried it several times and it always crash either at the very end of the install or on the first 60 seconds after the initial boot after the install finished, after several attempts using safe mode I managed to sort of get windows 10 working without crashing but there was a bunch of essential programs and settings missing from windows so that ended up being a useless install and after I just gave up but I would love to get Win10 working on this machine, I hate macOS, performance has been terrible these last couple of years.

I too have a 27-inch, Mid 2011 iMac. I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 two days ago without any issues... until I realized Boot Camp didn't work (haha silly me). Just today I reverted back to W7, am currently downloading Yosemiteas an upgrade from Mavericks, and I will attempt to re-install W10 once everything is in place with Boot Camp.

As for my short experience with W10, well, it was actually quite enjoyable. I have an Xbox One so the new interface in W10 was an easy transition for me - a lot of the apps and tools are similar. I even fired up the Xbox app and was able to stream my Xbox One to my iMac from the living room and play some Destiny. Really cool stuff.

I have the exact same model as you and have had no issues with windows 10. Even though it is not supported officially because bootcamp 6 only goes back to 2012 models. I did an upgrade from windows 7 as well to avoid any unforeseen issues, I'm currently only using 16 GB of ram because I don't see a need for 32.

Zippy, what version of Boot Camp are you running? Before I installed Yosemite I was getting crashes in W10 while trying to switch back to OSX so I'm hesitant to try the W10 install without Boot Camp 6. Are you using version 5 still? Is it even possible to install version 6 on a pre-2012 Mac?

I'm still using 5.1 with no issues, and to answer your other question, no it isn't possible to install bootcamp 6 on a pre 2012 imac unless apple changes it. the best advice I can give is to open bootcamp assistant in osx and check the box to download the latest support software onto a flash drive then install them on windows.

I also have a 27" 2011 iMac (i7 860 @ 2.8 GHz, 16 GB RAM) but am currently dual-booting with Windows 8.1 and El Capitan beta. I thought 8.1 was required to upgrade to Windows 10? I am happy to see that you all did not have any problems, as I am about to do the upgrade as well. I was a bit worried that it wouldn't work since Boot Camp support seems to have been dropped for us ?. I hope to continue to use this as my "super machine" for the foreseeable future. I also use it as a television with my DirecTV reciever, PS3, and PS4 due to lucking out that it is able to accept incoming signal in its DVI port. I would be very sad when the day comes that something major is not supported on this... Will update post after installation - wish me luck!

Unless you have an Apple supported computer besides your 2011 iMac, there is no way to get Boot Camp 6 as far as I can tell. Even if you could get Boot Camp 6, there is no guarantee that it will have drivers for all the components in the 2011 iMac it may have some but certainly not all, which is why the 2011 iMac isn't supported by Apple.

So I'm guessing that it is all done on the OS X side of things? I am not finding a way to update Bootcamp on the Windows side for some reason. (Surprising, since I was prompted to install the iCloud for Windows Beta v5...?)

One more question - how long did it take from when you all requested the Win10 update to when it became available to you? Or, did everyone here do a clean install? I didn't realize there was a wait until now... I only use Windows a little bit of the time so I can't sit around with Windows up all day for that reason only.

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