Still free upgrade to Win 10

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

(In fact, one of them lives with me, but that case has more to do with a couple of much-loved apps that she's never upgraded from their XP-era versions.)

I use quite a few favorite of my favorite apps that were designed for XP on both Win 7 and Win 10. So far, the only program I cannot use was the old Photograv 2.1 version. I was never able to get it to work on Win 7 and have not tried on Win 10. (I didn't spend much time on it because I kept my old Win XP machine for any time I need to use Photograv.)

The biggest problem I have with still running my old Eudora 7.1.0.9 program, is it can't handle today's character coding such as "smart quotes" and other characters. For example, it will display an apostrophe as ’.

Those much-loved apps may still work on Win 10. All my other old apps work exactly as they did on Win XP.

[Lee DeRaud]

Those much-loved apps may still work on Win 10. All my other old apps work exactly as they did on Win XP.

Most of mine, too. I think I'm finally winning the battle to convince her to get a new machine (or have me build one)...it helped that I discovered it would only add about $150 to simply buy the current versions of her "must-have" apps.

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

Hopefully the "must-have" apps still do what she wants them to do. I stay with my old Eudora email because I don't like the new ones. They don't have all the features I actually use in my Eudora. The other reason for keeping some old apps is the new ones require yearly subscriptions without much more benefit.

[Tom Stenzel]

Can't believe I'm even considering this, but because I have an HP Win8 desktop with a dead hard drive that (a) in HP's infinite wisdom, instead of supplying a recovery DVD they put the recovery program on the hard drive *****

Ken, HP expected you to make your own recovery disks with a utility. I did with my Toshiba. If you're really desperate for Windows 8 I have it on DVDs. The downside is that they're 8.0. After the install you'll be faced with a gig or two of updates, then another 2 gig or so update to 8.1, then more updates. It took 3 days for my laptop to chew through it all.

If you need drivers and utilities unique to your machine you'll have to find them on the HP site. Hopefully.

Which raises an interesting problem. My daughter's laptop started with 8.0, updated to 8.1 and then got the update to WIN 10 while it was free. But if she has to "refresh" the computer the recovery partition on the hard drive will send her back to Win 8.0. Can she then ever get windows 10 back again? That's why I grabbed the WIN.ISO, so hopefully her free update stays that way.

-Tom

[Kev Williams]

Tom, sounds like the laptop is able to boot to either OS? Go to MSCONFIG and check the BOOT tab to see if both OS's are listed, if so make sure win10 is the default--

[Ole Anderson]

I used the link in the first post, it worked on a 5 YO Dell XPS that must have had the "future Win 10 upgrade" marker in it's system yet even though they only gave you a year to redeem it. Upgrade to Win 10 went smooth. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...load/windows10

[Chuck Wintle]

My 42 month old Dell laptop has been slow, one thing I wanted to do was to update from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 10, but software is over $100 and I understood that the free upgrade offer expired long ago. Yesterday I ran across this Microsoft link that worked at no cost. I am now running Windows 10 Pro. No key was required. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...load/windows10 Happy camper.

Why would you want such a flawed os?

[Ole Anderson]

Why would you want such a flawed os?

Hmm, Mac user? Linux user? DOS 3.0 user? Which one could it be?