PK Official Poll Time Again, How about this for a change.

[Ink stained Fingers]

it's not so much Microsoft taking care of support for existing hardware, that is much more the job of the manufacturers of all this hardware and their interest to do that - or not, and to force you to get new hardware with new drivers. If you want to extend the period for the Win10 upgrade with the existing hardware - PC or Notebook + whatever additional hardware you can buy pretty easily - Ebay and other software distributors - a Win7 license key for about €20, install W7 on a separate disk, and run the Win10 update now, put it away and use it whenever you want - in 2 years or whenever you think it's time, that will be much cheaper than buying a full Win10 license after this 1 year free upgrade period. But changing the PC hardware won't be possible since the Win10 registration is tied to the processing hardware.

 

[nrdlnd]

If you want to extend the period for the Win10 upgrade with the existing hardware - PC or Notebook + whatever additional hardware you can buy pretty easily - Ebay and other software distributors - a Win7 license key for about €20, install W7 on a separate disk, and run the Win10 update now, put it away and use it whenever you want - in 2 years or whenever you think it's time, that will be much cheaper than buying a full Win10 license after this 1 year free upgrade period. But changing the PC hardware won't be possible since the Win10 registration is tied to the processing hardware.

Really great tip! With Win 7 though I think it is possible to transfer the licence to new hardware. Do you mean that Microsoft has changed this policy also when you upgrade from Win 7? Then this is evil!

The extended support for Win 10 ends 2025 and Win 7 2020. I'ts of course possible to use Win 7 even after that. I can use it for calibrating my Dell monitor in hardware, use my raw developer, use my printing program and avoid using it for web browsing and continue to use for example Linux for this. So I think it's rather safe to continue to use Win 7 and unnecessary to upgrade to Win 10 with all it's unnecessary functions. 2025 I may have to make a decision and probably leave Windows altogether (hopefully much earlier)!

Per

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

you can transfer a Win7 license from one piece of hardware to another, yes, that's possible , but it is told and confirmed by Microsoft that you cannot do that with a W10 registration, MS is pretty reluctant with revealing details how and what they do in detail and what would constitute such change - most likely not swapping a disk, but most likely swapping a motherboard, with a different serial number, different hash value of the BIOS contents whatever. There are dealers taking back deinstalled company hardware/software, and they officially can de-register the Win7 product keys with MS. They opposed that very much in the past but are forced by court decisions to accept a second use of such licenses, at least in Germany, I think in the EU, and those keys are entitled for a free W10 upgrade - as long as that is offered. But after a month you cannot go back to Win7 anymore, could not move to another hardware, and then use that W10 registration again, that won't work . It's all pretty tricky with MS, and the new registration mechanism is just their trick to prevent any second use of such W10 licenses and tie it to the hardware. There may be special exceptions for repairs and such , you need to be a lawyer with technical expertise to understand everything what they are doing, and with special company and volume licenses the administration/registration may be different as well.
Microsoft will charge typical prices for W10 once the grace upgrade period is over. If you plan, or do not exclude it completely to move to W10, to give a test at least, not now, you can 'buy effectively such W10 upgrade for a very low price now with new product key, do the upgrade, put the disk away, and test it , use it whenever, in a year or two. You may first run a tremendous amount of patch updates then but o.k., that's life with Windows whatever version.
If you plan to move to W10 with new hardware which supports all their convenience functions this approach won't work.

 

[PeterBJ]

A retail version of Windows can be transferred to another computer, an OEM version cannot, it is locked to the computer it is first installed on. If a retail Windows 7 is upgraded to an OEM Windows 10 then it is no bargain even if it is free.

If you use the free upgrade to Windows 10 then a folder windows.old is created on your harddisk, and within one month you can go back to your previous Windows version. I read that after that month it is no longer possible to roll back the upgrade.

Using Keyfinder, I found out that the key for the Windows 10 32 bit was different from the key for the Windows 7 32 bit I upgraded from. I thought it might be possible not to roll back the upgrade but do a fresh install on a formatted harddisk.

As I upgraded to Windows 10 in August, I decided to do a fresh Windows 7 install on another harddisk, just in case Microsoft would no longer accept my Windows 7 as legitimate, but as can be seen here, Windows 7 is activated, click to enlarge:



My laptop is a Medion bought from Aldi. It came with a restore partition on the harddisk, a restore DVD that also contains 32 and 64 bit drivers and install programs for the preinstalled programs, and a 32 bit and a 64 bit Windows install DVD.The key written by the install DVD is different from the key on the license sticker, so if my key was rejected I would have tried the key from the sticker. Luckily that was not necessary.

I don't know how the situation is if you built your computer yourself and bought a retail or OEM install disk. These disks come with individual keys, I am sure Medion uses the same generic key for all computers of the same model and intended for the same country.

 

[nrdlnd]

A retail version of Windows can be transferred to another computer, an OEM version cannot, it is locked to the computer it is first installed on.

I'm not quite sure of that as I bought an OEM-licence on eBay of Win 7 Pro and installed it on a computer I've built myself. It was a German version and I did also manage to make it a Swedish version with some help from a program I found on the net. I think it's called "Vistalizator". Vistalizator is actually a very useful program as i bought a refurbished Dell tablet from the US with Win 8 Pro on it (English version) and ive made it a Swedish version with the help of this program. This computer I've upgraded to Win 10 as it's touch sensitive and Win 10 is useful for this. I've deactivated as many Microsoft apps as possible and have no account with them.
Per

 

[nrdlnd]

As I've written before I have updated one computer (actually a tablet that also functions as a pc with docking station and keyboard and mouse and I mostly use it like that) to Win 10. It came with Win 8.1 that I updated with "Classic Shell" (a free program). That makes it look like Win 7 and works in the same way. I just got an update with some improvements for Win 10. A pc with Win 10 and Classic Shell has about the same functionality as Win 7. It could therefore be an alternative to upgrade to Win 10 just before the free upgrade ends next summer when it's more mature and install Classic Shell to have 5 more years of updates and of course deinstall as much of the unnecessary "features" that come with the program.

Per

 

[Pentode]

No don't laugh...... I just semi retired my XP pro 'pewter' and built a Win 7 one, still gonna install XP on a spare drive though.

Trouble is with Win 10 there's a lot of configging to do otherwise it'll be phoning home letting Billy Gate's know what you are up to.... and no doubt other departments plus you'll end up MS pushing their adverts - it's just bloatware I'd say.

Has Microsoft had it's day I ask, if MS is developing operating systems at a rate of knots what chances have the manufacturing keeping up with their software and drivers etc?

Be like me..... wait 20 years and then think about it, works out cheaper too.

Dave.

 

[The Hat]

Using XP on line today is like sleeping with a live grenade in your hand and the pin pulled, it makes for one hell of a wake up call..

 

[Pentode]

"Hey, there's a pin thingy just fell out, werzit go"?

Must admit I didn't have ALL the services running worked a treat for me, no viruses, no hacks AND that was 32bits, gone all posh now I'm on Win 7 64bits.

 

[peter D]

I switched to Windows 10 Professional back in late 2015 and was ignorant of the fact that you could switch back to Windows 7 at virtually the press of a button as all the settings and drivers etc for the earlier version of Windows were retained on the HDD. This switch back offer was only valid for a month if I recall after which time the retained data was automatically erased and a complete reinstall of an early OS version was required if you didn't like the new OS.
With such an easy trial system in place I would recommend giving Win 10 a try.
The first new drivers and software that I downloaded from the Canon website were the updated version of Print Studio Pro and of course new printer drivers for Windows 10 OS.
The Canon Pro 100 has the option of using both 8 and 16 bit printing drivers and the XPS version (16 bit printing) requires the 8 bit driver to be installed for it to work. I had experienced quite a long period when the XPS driver would not work at all and in fact would freeze the Canon Studio Print Pro program completely upon selecting the final "print" button necessitating a restart of the PC. Communication with MS tech staff failed to throw any light on the problem. The advantages of using the new version of Studio Print Pro outweighed the lack of 16 bit printing at the time so I deleted the XPS driver for some 3 or 4 months ago. Recently I reinstalled it to see if the steady flow of Win 10 OS upgrades had managed to fix the problem and was pleasantly surprised to discover they had, There is now a 20 second delay before printing data is sent to the printer when in XPS mode when the final print instruction has been made but it does now work.
The new Canon Print Studio Pro program now allows soft proofing so that you get an idea of the difference between Relative Colorimetric and Perceptual rendering settings for example. Also there are a number of improvements to the paper size settings in that you can record your own custom presets for paper sizes to speed up your preferred paper size settings.
I find Windows 10 fairly intuitive to use compared with Windows 7 and quite like the program with the reservation that MS seem to have given up on the Explorer browser at least as far as this particular OS version is concerned. The compatibility with old printers could also prove to be an issue as I found numerous problems appeared when trying to run an old HP Business Jet from Windows 10. The upside being that this hardy old printer was soon on it's way to the recyclers and a new Brother monochrome laser printer is now handling my office document printing. The deals on home office lasers are such that persisting with older hardware for text printing is hardly justified with even non OEM toner cartridges being readily available.