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I had got an OEM activated Windows 8.1 home edition on the purchase of my new DELL laptop.After getting the notification of a windows 10 upgrade,I had started the upgrade process and my OEM key was upgraded to windows 10 via digital entitlement.
Now,maybe I made a mistake, I should have made a rescue disk to revert back to the old windows 10 if just in case I needed to repair things up.Recently,my PC got infected by some adware and malware stuff, and I was forced to perform a factory reset to revert back to the factory windows 8.1 OS.It was almost near to the date the free upgrade to windows 10 was about to get over.I now want to upgrade my PC again to windows 10,but I am wondering if I would be able to do it again without paying any fees.I had my 8.1 OEM key upgraded to 10 key so I guess this should not be a problem,even after the free upgrade is past the date.
So please tell me,will I be now able to upgrade my PC again to 10 with the OEM key just as I had done before?Or should I download the official ISO file from media creation tool and activate the product through my OEM key?
Sarthak Mehra
Posted 2016-08-03T16:40:41.170
Reputation: 31
Once upgraded to W10 and it activates, you can reinstall at any time for free, just install W10 with or without old key and it will activate automatically. – Moab – 2016-08-03T16:48:02.167
Do I straightaway download the win 10 iso or do i first download the 8.1 home iso file and use it to upgrade again to windows 10? – Sarthak Mehra – 2016-08-03T16:57:17.547
@SarthakMehra Yes, just use the Media Creation tool from the Microsoft site and it should install it for you. When it asks for a key you should click "skip" and it will continue. So long as you did actually have an activated copy of Windows on that machine then it should reactivate fine. – Mokubai – 2016-08-03T17:31:38.653
Clean install W10, which means no having to install W8 first. – Moab – 2016-08-03T17:37:42.357
A clean install and a upgrade where you keep nothing is exactly the same, one you boot to the installation disk, the other you do from within Windows, both result in your drive being formatted. – Ramhound – 2016-08-03T19:16:14.927