MARCH 2020 • TECH ADVISOR 103license terms.) Windows 7 Starter, Home Basic, and
Home Premium will upgrade to Windows 10 Home,
while the other Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate
editions will be replaced with Windows 10 Pro.
You can either perform an in-place upgrade to
upgrade to Windows 10 directly on the PC, or else
download the tool onto a separate USB key (with at
least 8GB of free space) or onto a CD-R or rewritable
DVD. The latter option will allow you to upgrade
multiple PCs.
Note that you’ll still need a valid Windows 7 license
for the tool to work. If, for some reason, Windows
doesn’t detect the license on the machine, you may
need to enter it manually. You may need to dig out the
old Windows 7 license key – our license-key tutorial
can help out here, especially the section on using the
Magical Jelly Bean Key Finder. You may also have the
license key tucked away on a sticker on the laptop
ordesktop.(Theproductkeyshouldbefivesetsof
lettersand numbers, formatted like this: xxxxx-xxxxx-
xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx)
Be sure to back up everything you wouldn’t want
to lose: documents and photos, at a minimum. That
means copying those files to a backup hard drive, DVD,
or the cloud. This is a ‘better safe than sorry’ scenario:
by default, Windows will preserve the apps, settings,
and files when it upgrades your system to Windows
- (You can also back up your files in Windows 7, and
restore them later in Windows 10.)
We can’t say how long the process will take. From
downloading the tool and the necessary files, and
performing the upgrade, and possibly downloading