And that's why I won't "upgrade" to Win10 any time soon ;)

[Ttaskmaster]

After 30 days, windows.old is deleted, so 'reverting' will no longer work. If you want to go back to Win7, you'll have to remove Win10 and do a clean Win7 install.

Yup, picked up most of that, although didn't know Win.old was autodeleted...
No biggie. Have full retail Win7 anyways. Kinda the point, as I've upgraded most of my key components on a good 5 occasions in recent times.

Certainly, if you upgrade from a Win7 licence to a Win10 licence, that system then operates under the terms of the W10 licence, and your Win7 licence is not currently valid, in the sense that you cannot legally use it AS WELL, like on a different system.

Well... yeah... even *I* can work that one out (which means it's really easy!)
That'd require two licence keys, or a volume licence of some kind.
I also figured you couldn't run some kind of Dual Boot Win7 and Win10 on the one PC.

I've not seen any official confirmation that, provided you aren't still running the W10 update, you can still install the original W7 system and not have, or potentually have, trouble with activation.

I feel better and slightly less stupid, since you don't know...

Are we going to have trouble getting MS to activate that Win77 system after, say, 6 months, if we decide to dump Win10.

I assume that's why they're offering the free upgrade - To push as many people off Win7 as poss, so they can drop it.

[GuidoLS]

1) Saracen made my point much more succinctly than I did re: reversion. Sometimes I type things, thinking that what I'm trying to convey is obvious - obviously it's not, sometimes. Apologies.

2) It's anecdotal but - I have backed off (reverted) and re-installed from Win10 back to Win7. These were all upgrades (not clean installs) during the insider preview, with 3 that were upgraded to RTM. Of these, the ones that were less than 30 days old, that I had not done a disk cleanup of (iow, windows.old still existed) I was able to begin the process of reverting. As these were clean installs, I aborted the process and did clean installs from original Win7 media. Those older than 30 days, the option was greyed out - nothing I did could make it work. This included machines that were still insider status and machines that were upgraded to RTM. It also included machines that had the old install of Windows left on strictly for experimenting. All machines took a clean install of 7, including activation, with no issues. This was a combination of upgrade codes, full retail codes and OEM machines. I won't argue that this will apply to machines upgraded to RTM and the revert/reinstall happens after 29 August (1 month of live) nor, in Saracen's scenario, after 6 months. My magic 8ball isn't talking to me these days, and truth be told, I didn't need to wait that long to decide if it was the right thing for me. For the most part, there's no need for *ME* to upgrade all of my eligible machines. I think this is going to apply to a lot of people, but I also suspect a lot of people simply won't care - they want the brightest, shiniest thing, and it's free. And if they're upgrading from 8.1, they won't notice any difference in privacy (or lack thereof).

3) I fully appreciate that I'm not everyone - I'll just say that my problem with Win 10 is strictly privacy related, and not functionality. Those that run custom software may wish to hold off until that particular dev releases new software, but driver wise, I've found very little that didn't just work. There are annoyances. I don't like the way the task bar looks, and I don't care for the way that the start menu is laid out, but they both are functional, if a little (or a lot) crippled. I'm still trying to figure out if it's Classic Shell that's causing issues with the notification area on the task bar, or if it's uxStyle. Both have issues regardless.

4) Other than security updates, MS has dropped Win7. They are contractually obligated to multiple large government agencies to provide these, gratis, until 2020. They can't drop that. But they've made it no secret that they would really prefer for everyone to be in the same, current environment. As it stands, they're already supporting 4 1/2 major OS versions in one way or another, and they have a paid team to keep WindowsXP viable for certain agencies. Common sense would dictate wanting that situation to go away. There's nothing saying people can't still use it. I know people that still use XP based machines as daily drivers.

[cam1986]

Win 10 has been a smooth upgrade and so far everything works as it should!