Have you upgraded to Windows 10 yet?
If you have Windows 7 or 8 then the upgrade is free, wonderful, hooray for Microsoft that is the way to get as many people as possible to upgrade to Windows 10.
So that’s what I thought when I decided to upgrade two of my computers to Windows 10 when I was having network problems, if it does not work I can always go back to the existing Windows operating system which on these machines was Windows 7.
So I clicked the link and filled in the form and waited on the upgrade happening, “This may take a few days” said Microsoft “You are now registered for the upgrade so we will be in contact” After three weeks I decided that their contact system must be swamped so I downloaded the software and performed the upgrade myself, after all I have 30 years experience of being a computer programmer and I have been fiddling with the intricacies of DOS for just as long, what could possibly go wrong!
The initial install went well, very smooth which should have been a warning sign as when has any install from Microsoft gone smoothly? Windows 10 was up and running on both machines and more to the point they had resolved my ongoing network issues, I was a happy bunny.
Then about a week ago I started to get some problems connecting to the Internet, after a bit of an investigation I determined that I had some corrupt operating system files and the best way to fix it was to do a reinstall of Windows. I did the reinstall which seemed to fix my connection issues, then a few hours later I discovered the message “This copy of Windows has not been activated” which I thought funny as that should have been an automated process when the reinstall was completed. I tried to manually activate using my previous product key for Windows 7 but that came up as invalid.
So I contacted Microsoft on their instant chat line, I got one of their very pleasant support staff on the line who asked me what the problem was. I fully explained the issue and how I had reinstalled Windows 10, this is where it started to become surreal, “I am sorry sir” says he, “you do not have a valid Windows 10 product key” “I have a valid Windows 7 product key” says I, “and according to your website I can upgrade it to Windows 10 for free and when I did it the first time the key activated correctly”. “Yes sir” he replied, “but that was because you upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7, you cannot use a Windows 7 product key to install Windows 10” “So how do I resolve this” says I. “You need to roll back your install to Windows 7 and then perform the upgrade all over again.” I had to stop at this point and do a summary of what I had just heard, then I asked him this “So let me get this right. I upgraded from 7 to 10 and it activated OK but I had some network issues so I decided to reinstall 10. But in order to get 10 reactivated I need to reinstall 7, activate that, and then reinstall 10?”, “That’s correct Jackie”.
Are you all following this so far or have you moved onto the cartoons?
So anyway to cut the rest of the long story short I performed a roll back on my computer expecting it to go to Windows 7 but it went to the first install of Windows 10 instead but guess what? That had a valid product key and somewhere along the way my original connection issues had all been resolved.
Microsoft are a strange company, they work in mysterious ways and when you get into the nitty gritty of Windows it’s a black art that should be taught by Professor Snape at Hogwarts.
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