I know... the title is a little bit unintuitive (or maybe not), anyway read the following text.

Ed Bott says, for sure, that you can reserve your Win10 upgrade
Posted on May 12th, 2016 at 09:43 woody

Ed and I had a twitter exchange about it. I remain skeptical – I used terms like “loophole” and “trick” — but, hey, Microsoft reads Ed’s stuff intently, and he hasn’t issued a retraction. So there you go.

Subject in point: If you have a “genuine” copy of Win7 or 8.1, and you upgrade it to Win10, only to immediately move back to your old Win7 or 8.1 (full drive backup is your friend), your 100% certified real copy of Windows 10 will be yours to keep forever.

Yes, the last version of Windows will always be free for you. The only limitation? At least at this point, you need to perform the little pirouette before July 29. This is important even if you think you’ll never upgrade to Win10. No sense throwing away a free upgrade.

Ed Bott, ZDNet How to lock in your free Windows 10 upgrade and keep using your old Windows version

Source
AskWoody

 

Last edited: May 13, 2016

Using Windows 10 will cease to be free at some point when they move to a subscription model. So this installation will become useless. You think MS are such idiots? They are idiots, but they do want their profits one way or the other. Just think about it.

And this Windows XP and W7 I have and use will work the same even 50 years from now anyway. *As it is*, there are enough various sequencers, DAWs, editors, various tools and other crap available for it to keep anybody going for about a century. So until you're dead and buried, that's my point. I still have, if lucky, about at least 20-40 years to live.

Windows 10 is only necessary for those insane people who want to use the Internet with Windows. There's no other use for it. Soon it's going to be the only MS OS receiving fixes and patches. Well, after 2020, so not really that soon. Anyway, I don't give a flying potato about it as it will never stop working with my audio tools, patched or not. Patches are generally only needed if you use the Internet. Having said that, Internet will still work also, patched or not. However, I'd recommend to use at least 2 antivirus programs, some anti-malware, a good firewall, and a lot of common sense. [2 antivirus programs was sarcasm, it is recommended to use just one, or none]

Cheers!

 

Luck for you Windows users.
MAC users are since years *forced* by Apple to change their machines every year or so!
With persistent and aimed dropping of support & backwards/forward compatibility they make
older OS practically obsolete after a short time! Plus they enslave 3d party developers too.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

With subscriptions comes the end of anonymity. Will these companies get away with it? Judging by the cluelessness of American voters it sure looks like it. Maybe the rest of the world will save us from these tyrannical American tech monopolies.

 

I'll preface my reply by stating that I'm very concerned about privacy in this era and it's a topic I follow closely.

You don't need to wait for the subscription model to begin. Anonymity ended somewhere after Win98. If you've been using the hosts file to block outgoing connections to Microsoft, you can stop. Microsoft has been white-listing its own servers since Win7. What I find amazing is that these secrets were discovered long ago, yet its users, in general, shrug it off in exchange for convenience. THAT is the problem. People happily hand Microsoft that level of permission to intrude on their privacy. It has nothing to do with elections.

This is what's known so far about the data WIn10 collects and sends to Microsoft. Note: this list doesn't include the data collected about the contents of your hard disk, which is also sent to Microsoft.

Looking at the Microsoft Terms of Service, here's what they define as "data":
• A search query to Bing,
• A voice command to Cortana
• A document uploaded to OneDrive
• A support request to Microsoft
• Cookies, error reports or usage data from software running on your device
• Your first and last name, email address, postal address, phone number, and other similar contact data
• Passwords, password hints, and "similar security information"
• The contacts you have and communicate with if you use a Microsoft service to manage your contacts or communicate
• Your age, gender, country and preferred language
• The teams you follow in a sports app, the stocks you track in a finance app, or the favorite cities you add to a weather app
• A credit card number and the security code associated with it
• The items you purchase, the web pages you visit, and the search terms you enter
• The subject line and body of an email (provided you're using a Microsoft product or service to send that email)
• The text or other content of an instant message (provided you're using a Microsoft product or service to send that message)
• The audio and video recording of a video message (provided you're using a Microsoft product or service to send that message)
• Audio recording and transcript of a voice message you receive or a text message you dictate
• Data about any social network accounts that are linked to your Microsoft account

 

craziest thing with windows 8.1 for me is the crashing (file) explorer when trying to copy or move files from one junction point to another (i cant stand the drive letter thingie and mount partitions in "folders" like on unix and use junction points to share common files on my multiboot win xp/win 7/win8.1/hackmac), have to use third party tools to move things around ^^ and i thought w7 was bad - good i need it only to play a game from time to time