Windows 7 to Windows 10/11: To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade - What would 'the Bard' Have Done ?

 

Microsoft (MS) withdrew support for Windows 7 way back in 2014 in line with their general policy of planned version obsolescence. By all accounts, there are still a considerable number of older pcs running Win 7; their owners have either simply not been able to afford the cost of an upgrade, or have heard of the obstacles to upgrading, and are quite reasonably reluctant to risk trying to upgrade an older pc with a new OS that it may not be able to cope with.

For anyone actually brave enough to try upgrading a Win 7 pc,  MS have thrown an additional spanner in the works by no longer offering  downloads for Win 10 or Win 11 installation on pcs which they detect are still running Windows 7 or XP. Users are therefore effectively prevented by MS from using either of the more recent OS versions......the very versions that MS were originally prepared to let you upgrade to for free. This is an obvious ploy to force users to replace their old (but still serviceable) pcs with newer ones with Win 11 pre-installed (at considerable cost - a halfway decent laptop will cost you upwards of £300 new nowadays), and confirms they are 'in league with' the manufacturers. This policy is clearly anti-environmental, and one hopes that MS will eventually pay the price, along with the manufacturers, and other 'big tech' offenders against our solar system's only habitable planetary environment.

Given the number of Win 7-equipped machines still running, blocking upgrades in this way was clearly a nonsensical move from a business point of view, since it will already have a) deterred pc users from investing in future Microsoft products and b) actively encouraged unlicensed use of new OS versions. No doubt Apple and Google will have benefited in the short term from their error. More importantly perhaps, anyone caught out by it will be unlikely to ever to favour MS products over other options in future – ‘once bitten, twice shy’ as the old saying goes….

One way of circumventing this problem, while avoiding any risk to your current working Win 7 installation, is to set up an external USB drive with Win 10 or Win 11installed on it. This can then be used as a mobile installation and should run on any pc with the same bit architecture (32 or 64 Bit) that has an available USB port and the necessary spec.

In my view, given MS’s behaviour,  the use of alternative ways of exercising your paid-for rights to use the Windows OS and obtain any upgrades required to enable you to continue doing so effectively, is amply justified.

As discussed, MS deliberately make life difficult for would-be Win 7 upgraders in an attempt to maintain their profit margins, even for more recent versions which have either already been deprecated (Win 7, 8, 10), or will soon be (e.g. Win 11). The only ‘help’ they will give you if you contact them direct is to offer you a new license for Windows 11 (ca £140) or a subscription to Microsoft 365 (at considerable cost – even the Basic version is ca £10 per month, an unwelcome and necessary additional recurrent expense for many of us). This is no coincidence – their business model is based on forcing consumers to upgrade periodically and they have now introduced a ‘premium’ subscription package for MS 365 to ensure a regular income as further Windows development starts to decline and pcs become progressively less popular. To add insult to injury, they have now withdrawin support for Windows 10 (August 2025), forcing many existing users of this more recent package into yet another costly upgrade.

To provide some help for those of us afflicted by the ‘MS Curse’, I’ve provided a procedure to enable Win 7 users, who are still (quite rightly!) wary of upgrading their internal HDDs or SSDs, to try out Windows 10 using an external USB drive. Once set up, this should work with any other Windows laptop or desktop with the same bit architecture. This will enable anyone who is keen to try out a newer version of Windows than v7, but doesn’t want to risk a full installation they may not be able to reverse, to do so without risk or additional cost. You’ll find detailed instructions on how to do this in a .pdf document which you can download here.

I’ve also included additional instructions to enable you to install or re-install Office 2010 Professional Plus on the same drive….and activate it. Although this is an older version of the Office suite, and is no longer offered for download by MS, I can confirm it works well under Windows 10 and 11, and has most of the features offered by more recent versions…and none of the bugs.  You can still download the .iso file yourself from the Archive.org website.

Hope fully the complete package I've outlined will enable you to carry on using your faithful old pc effectively without breaking the bank (or the pc!), and provide some cover if and when MS devise a way to stop Windows 7 working altogether.

I hope this is useful...I have not attempted to try the same methodology for Windows 11 as yet, but this should be possible using the Hasleo software as described in the .pdf document for Win 10 - good luck if you want to try that for yourself.....

And what would the Bard have done ?...my guess is that he would have hedged his bets and retained his working copy of Win 7 at all costs...and knocked off an excoriating play about MS and the evils of 'Big Tech' over the following weekend.....

First published 16.3.25 Revised 6.3.26

Update 17.3.25: I can confirm that the test installation described works well on two different 64 bit pcs - a Dell Vostro 1520 laptop and an HP desktop, both of late noughties or early teens vintage and still running Win 7. One point to note which might not be immediately obvious - if you boot via USB, you will not unfortunately have access to the files on your pc's internal hard drive. This is because the pc effectively treats the USB drive as its internal drive when running the newer OS version, and everything operates through that.

Make sure you transfer any files you want to access to your WinToGo SSD before you boot up if you want them to be available when running Win 10.

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