For many years, performing an in-place upgrade was something you only did to workstations — and even then, these upgrades were usually for consumer machines. The main reason an IT purest would do an in-place upgrade was to capture the free upgrade. Especially for business deployments, the thinking has been that it’s best to do a clean install when upgrading to a new operating system.
Even though the free upgrade to Windows 10 offer has ended, you can still upgrade for free from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. Begin with your licensed Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. Then download the Windows 10 media creation tool to create a bootable iso file. And click on the resulting setup.exe file to begin the process of upgrading from your Windows 7 or 8.1 machine.
