We tried to upgrade my wife’s laptop from Win8.1 to 10 on the last day of the free offer and it didn’t work (we got a message saying it had already expired. Not sure why - not a time zone issue as we’re ahead of the USA). We shrugged and gave up.
Then suddenly on Monday this week, Windows 10 upgrade assistant dialog popped up and after a brief clickthrough, then a half hour of downloads and updates, the machine is running Windows 10 - I checked and it’s activated and licensed.
I know there are some workarounds that were still open for upgrading to Win10, but we didn’t do any of that - this came out of the blue.
Has MS started mopping up more Windows 8.x users with free upgrades?
Yeah, that’s the workaround that I heard about - but even then, I don’t think there is any push notification for the upgrade (I read a tech article that described jumping through a bunch of hoops to get a licence key).
Microsoft has always kept open the option for a free Windows 10 upgrade under accessibility. Microsoft does not define eligibility, leaving it up to the user. Regardless of whether you have an actual accessibility “need” you can upgrade to Windows 10:
Did you lose any data with the upgrade? I was going to upgrade my GF’s PC last summer but never got around to it and didn’t have my backup drive with me at the time so I didn’t just press the upgrade button.
No - it was all still there. There were a load of weird/dead tiles in the start menu after the upgrade, but I think these were the Windows 8 tutorials (which obviously are no longer relevant).
I wonder if your earlier upgrade attempt actually registered with your system as a failed update and Windows Update just retried it, like it retries other failed updates sometimes.
Speculation, of course. If Windows were easy to understand, it wouldn’t be a Microsoft product.
One of the things that Microsoft did during the worst part of it’s most intrusive push to force upgrades, included downloading a full self-installable copy of Windows 10 to peoples’ computers during the night, or in the background, which could be triggered at any time later. Maybe you had one of those copies sitting dormant on your drive, and it was “awakened” by your efforts.
I myself had several PC’s which I was PROHIBITED from updating during the free period, and all of them at one time or another suddenly started to upgrade to Windows 10 on their own. I finally had to find and install a special Windows 10 upgrade PREVENTION application, which first deleted the existing copies of Windows 10 from my machines, and then permanently blocked Microsoft from re-installing them. It was the only way to protect my machines from Microsofts high-handedness.
This what I suspect. The license exists for the lifetime of the device once issued. It’s not so much that it tried the update again, but that it checked to see if your device had been registered. I suspect the failed update registered your device as a pending upgrade before it failed.