Post by Eorl @ 08:35am 22/01/15 | 32 Comments
The free upgrade will be available upon the launch of Windows 10, though it is timed to only the first year of its lifecycle. One of the bigger drawcards to upgrading for the gaming audience is DirectX 12, which is not offered on Windows 7.
A follow-up to the announcement by PC Gamer confirmed that the upgrade is entirely free, with no hidden costs or subscriptions to be noted. The upgrade will also not disappear after the first year, meaning if you don't take it upon yourself to upgrade within the free first year offer, you will have to pay for the upgrade. This does not mean your Windows 10 copy will be null and void after the first year.
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Posted 08:51am 22/1/15
Posted 08:53am 22/1/15
Posted 09:04am 22/1/15
Posted 09:11am 22/1/15
Posted 09:44am 22/1/15
I have a first generation Surface Pro, which for all intents and purposes, is a laptop that runs full windows 8. So it probably counts... Not sure though
Posted 10:14am 22/1/15
Posted 10:36am 22/1/15
Posted 11:07am 22/1/15
Have used it on my home worksation for a few months. I think you'll like it. I didn't hate 8, but I don't like using 8 at work now and am looking forward to RTM.
That said I think that anyone upgrading from 7 should image their current install first and give themselves a rollback. But I'd say that for any OS upgrade where the current OS was good / satisfactory so yeh.
lol paranoia++ Its actually quite explainable.
Microsoft is moving away from their consumer OS as a prime revenue stream. They're into services (think Office365, OneDrive, XBox Gold, Azure, Skype) and gadgets (Surface, XBox, Nokia/WP) now. These random acquisitions were not really random. They probably just want to encourage a big fat install base for their new unified platform for developers. Basically the idea is that they create a single publishing point (Windows Store) with apps essentially written once and easily shipped to desktop, tablet and PHONE.
The biggest whinge about WP is lack of apps. The biggest whinge from developers writing apps is that WP has small market share. They have a chicken and egg problem here. Desktop has epic market share, so writing an app that runs on Desktop-tablet-phone is a much more appealing proposition and is their strategy to bump Windows Phone (which is actually a kinda nice phone OS). Writing down Windows 10 for people who already own 7/8 isn't a big deal for them as part of this larger strategic movement.
As part of this strategy, I fully expect to someday soon see a $50-$100 annual consumer sub that includes a basic Office365 and the latest version of Windows.
This is why it is so important that Metro works well on desktop, and that Windows 10 be successful. Its why so much of Windows 10 is focused on Metro apps being regular windows as much as possible, and why they brought back the Start Menu and paid attention to gripes like 'how to turn off!':
They need Desktop and Modern to work together, and consumers to not reject Windows 10.
Hence free.
Posted 10:52am 22/1/15
Posted 11:40am 22/1/15
o.O lifetime of the device. They are definitely getting out of Windows as a retail product.
Posted 12:18pm 22/1/15
Posted 01:07pm 22/1/15
It SOUNDS like if you do it within that one year Window your PC is basically future proofed for future updates. Listening to the event at the moment, and they've (rather ambiguously) stated that Windows10 is the last Big Windows Version that you will ever buy for an existing device.
Posted 01:05pm 22/1/15
Posted 01:12pm 22/1/15
W7 is a patched up XP so going to W8 is a bit of a culture shock the tile start is really excellent and unlike previous versions their are no restrictions on the games you can install for eg i couldn't get old games like Splinter cell and Chaos theory (remember the horrid Star-force) to run on Vista or W7.
Posted 01:26pm 22/1/15
Yep, their broader strategy for at least the last 6-7 years is to eventually get out of selling software products full stop.
This move makes perfect sense considering the money has moved from selling products to selling services & devices that rely on those services:
Azure, AWS = Infrastructure/Platform as a Service
Office365, MASD, Adobe Creative Cloud, App stores etc = Software as a Service
Notice Visual Studio - first express editions, now a community edition with everything and the kitchen sink.
.NET as open source & cross platform, run it everywhere! Linux, Mac, but most importantly in those lucrative cloud scenarios.
They're practically giving their software away these days because they're freaking out about being left out in the cold by what ecosystems like Google Play store and Apple iTunes store will evolve into. TNSTAAFL of course. You would expect to pay just as much (if not more) for IT in the new world, it'll just come as a monthly bill so it won't be as obvious.
Posted 01:49pm 22/1/15
Posted 01:58pm 22/1/15
Funny you mention .Net; when it went OS I assumed they were getting out of on-the-tools development for it basically, and will eventually just maintain an oversight role for the official trunk?.
Windows is turning into a free or near-free service Microsoft delivers in order to try to get people to use their paid services and will probably heavily integrate with outlook.com in the same way it does with OneDrive soon. Its becoming their facebook / gmail / android basically. They're literally calling it a service.
We don't officially know how it works. But given that its still Windows you need to be able to reinstall (:D) so I imagine you would be able to move between them as your 8.x or 7 license will still be valid for the hardware.
Posted 02:06pm 22/1/15
Posted 04:08pm 22/1/15
.NET core exists because the ASP.NET team was screaming they can't iterate fast enough and enable key strategic scenarios because of the dependency on System.Web (and likewise IIS) in the full framework. At the same time they're taking the opportunity to get rid of a bunch of cruft intended for WinFS(!) but hardly ever used in the Entity Framework codebase.
Visual Studio will still exist, but it's available as an online service as well now.
The new Roslyn compiler tools are cool, instead of plain old csc.exe Roslyn allows both Microsoft and ISV's to do so many things that weren't viable before.
Posted 04:37pm 22/1/15
Spent too much time with my mechanic brother in law over chrissy maybe.
It WILL be new. But it has deeper roots in the traditional desktop.
Windows 10 hasn't backed away from that goal, they're just refining it. It wasn't a stupid idea really, just too ambitious to do well in a single release and at the same time maintain the always-important backwards compatibility with win32.
The Next Chapter presentation showed for example hybrid computers having a different interface based on whether they were in 'tablet mode' or 'desktop mode', with the tablet side of things drawing on the full-screen aspects of Modern and expanding on them, while desktop mode is a more traditional start menu and general window behaviour paradigm ... and the thing switches seamlessy between them, remembering where your windows were in desktop mode as you go between.
Looks delicious as someone who owns a laptop/tablet convertible.
Posted 04:53pm 22/1/15
Posted 05:15pm 22/1/15
Watched most of the event today while working.
Spartan (new IE) looks nice especially for collaboration
Cortana for PC
DX12 looks hot
New XBox One app for Windows 10 has lots of s***
Unified apps (ie basically lots more Store apps) will run on Xbox One
They demoed playing Fable Legends multiplayer co-op across XBone and PC!
XBone streaming to any Windows 10 PC or tablet (think Steam streaming thing)
Posted 05:20pm 22/1/15
Posted 05:33pm 22/1/15
edit: lol f*****g forum stripped out the iframe embed. Good job guys.
http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us
Posted 08:48pm 22/1/15
So let's say I decide to take the plunge and update to windows 10 for free and I end up hating it and going back to windows 7, could I use that same license in the future to re-upgrade to windows 10 when I'm forced to by games / programs that require it (assuming I'm still using the same hardware)? Or is this a one time deal where you can only upgrade once now for free, and if you format you're screwed?
My laptop came with W8, updated to 8.1 I might use it as the guinea pig.
side note on the piracy question: I own legit versions of every version of windows from 95 to windows 7. Yes, that means I bought windows Vista :( Only one I don't own is windows ME. Who would?
Posted 08:53pm 22/1/15
Posted 09:01pm 22/1/15
Posted 04:06am 23/1/15
It'd work for something slow paced like puzzle games or whatever but not for something like CoD or whatever the kids are playing on their fancy new consoles with their being on my lawn n s***.
Wireless game streaming has a long way to go before I'll get excited about it.
What I love about the current situation is that I can play my medias on any of my PC's, laptop, or even my phone and with a push of a button / touch of a screen / stroke of my wand I can make it play on my TV. That s*** is bananas.
Posted 09:28am 23/1/15
Posted 09:44pm 25/1/15
I'd hardly call Forza fast paced, and you can anticipate and compensate for cornering which is constant. You can't compensate for the lag in a game like CoD where everyone moves randomly. Hell, I switched back to a corded mouse because of the 0.0001ms lag between my wireless mouse and PC bugged me.
Like, I managed to play The Last Of Us via the wireless streaming thing, but there was still noticeable lag that bugged me and I can notice even the smallest little things.
It's all about the milliseconds baby.
Posted 09:56pm 25/1/15
But ... as if try streaming twitchy games over a wireless connection? o.O Its all about the ms, after all.
Posted 10:15pm 25/1/15
we had a meeting at work to discuss the same situation.
*finally* work is open the the concept of client-side virtualisation for all of the sites across Australia including mine.
* happy dance*
this means - running *nix as base OS and running the point of sale macines for front of house PCs in a managed VM envirnment that I can see and fix myself in my own time without the need of involving the Indians in Melbourne that Corp call our "IT Dept"
our Corp ICT is a young bloke - he doesn't understand anything outside Microsoft systems
last edited by koopz at 22:15:39 25/Jan/15