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Comment by feintruled | Hacker News Reader

Article synopsis: "When do they plan to end the offer? This article doesn't know. Probably the end date MS themselves specify. Oh you thought it was over already? Well did you know that if you need assistive tech, or say you do on the honor system, you can still get the Win 10 free upgrade? Interesting, eh?"

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Strange thing is, I didn't realise the regular offered ended and successfully upgraded 4 Windows 8.1 machines in the last month or so without any issue or doing anything regarding "Assistive tech".

I just put the Windows 10 ISO from the Microsoft site on a USB, kicked the install off, entered the Windows 8.1 licence key from the OEM sticker on the machine and it happily installed and activated.

Not sure if I'm an edge case with some peculiarity with our hardware vendor, but was surprised to learn the upgrade window finished sometime ago...

If the machines are branded laptops (or branded desktops like Dell or something) this can be an expected behavior: the license key that the Windows 10 licensing code checks and accepts by design could have been stored in the machine. It is still machine and vendor dependent.

If you've made any of the machines, e.g. by buying a motherboard or a barebone and then by installing Windows 8.1 yourself, it's a news to me.

EDIT: I'm especially interested in upgrades, not in "clean" installs. Most of the users don't want to start from the scratch with configuring every program they use.

I did an W10 clean install on a friend's selfbuilt PC using his 8.1 product key. Activated just fine.

OEM BIOS unlocks tend to not work between Windows versions. I've experimented with this a little. My go-to method to upgrade these is to clean install the version that will BIOS unlock, activate it, then upgrade that to Windows 10. After you upgrade, you can clean install Windows 10 on the system and it will activate normally.

Gen I get this for every article on HN? Maybe a userscript or extension with HN link synopsis?

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