I am running Windows 8.1 on a desktop PC upgraded from Windows XP via the $40 download offer. Well, you can use it until Microsoft stops supporting it, which is usually 10 years. Once you have installed Windows 10 and made a note of your product key, it’s yours forever. I read somewhere that the free upgrade to Windows 10 will expire after one year and that the user will then have to pay for the upgrade. Perhaps physical backups are not strictly necessary, but even if we never need them, they make some of us feel more secure. Once you have Windows 10 installed, it would be sensible to create restore discs, if that’s possible, or to take a drive image that you can use to restore your PC. (Windows Update will, at some point, delete its download to save disk space.) However, you might want to create these by downloading the Windows 10 upgrade from Microsoft’s website, instead of letting Windows Update do the upgrade. I also expect that Windows 10 will include the option to create your own restore DVDs. (The product key is on the Windows 10 Insider Preview ISO page.) If you have a product key then you can re-install Windows 10 in any way you want. I expect that the Windows 10 upgrade will be downloadable and will come with its own product key: this is how the current trial version of Windows 10 works. The free upgrade is for a limited period, so what happens when I have to re-install Windows 10 (PC slow, corrupt etc)? If it’s now 18 months or two years down the line, is it now chargeable? Will there be a downloadable version I can keep to re-install? Nigel Windows upgrade matrix, based on a slide shown by Microsoft’s Ming-che Julius Ho at WinHEC Shenzen 2015 in China.
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