How to reserve your free upgrade to Windows 10 for later use

Wiz Feinberg · Post by **Wiz Feinberg** » 27 Jul 2016 11:02 am

With the deadline for a free upgrade to Windows 10 only a couple days away, Many people who are still running Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 computers are caught worrying about losing the free upgrade offer. If you folks change your mind in a few weeks, or a month or two, you will have to pay at least $119 for a standard licensed version of Windows 10 (unless a retailer offers it for less).

If you are on the fence about upgrading and not quite there yet, you can follow the instructions on the following web pages to reserve a free upgrade for later use. It will take some work, but will save you the cost of a licensed disk in the near future.

How To Geek article
Infoworld article (by Woody Leonhard)

If, like me, you use either Acronis True Image or its competitor, Macrium Reflect, I would go with one of Woody's methods. Otherwise, if you have Windows 7 SP1 with the built in Windows 7 Backup program, save a complete "image" file of your boot disk, including the System Reserved partition. Then burn a recovery disk and use it to restore Windows 7 right after you perform an upgrade to Windows 10.

The least favorable option is to upgrade to Windows 10, then immediately perform a rollback to your previous OS. The reason I say this is less favorable is because I have done this twice and had serious problems after rolling back, both times.

These methods all work if you actually manage to load Windows 10 and log in at least once. This is because Microsoft uploads a special file from your computer to its upgrade servers. This file is a fingerprint of your motherboard and CPU and acts as a digital entitlement to a free license. Formatting your hard drive doesn't delete the digital license as it is stored in the MS Cloud.