I recently purchased an old PC from a garage sale. I'm always looking for bargains to satisfy my tinkering obsession.
I fired it up before I bought it and saw it had Windows 7 Home on it.
I brought it home and discovered the reason why they were probably selling it...the onboard LAN chip was dead.
So I ordered a PCI NIC which hopefully arrives by July 29th.
I used the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool to download the latest Windows 10 ISO.
I plan to upgrade this "spare" PC.
If the ordered NIC doesn't arrive by July 29th am I out of luck for the free upgrade?
Yes, you'd be out of luck. Unless Microsoft decides to change there deadline date, which I seriously doubt.
Nothing wrong with keeping it Windows 7, it's a great OS. After the deadline date to upgrade passes, run windows update to bring it current. I may need many updates if it was inactive for a long time or wasn't set to auto updates.
Just curious, what is the brand and model of the computer you found at the garage sale?
John
If you have a smart phone/tablet you could may be try to USB tether it and share it's connection.
Why do you think he is out of luck for the free upgrade just because he does not have a NIC in the computer? Create a USB flash drive or DVD from the downloaded ISO file. Do the upgrade from the flash drive or DVD. Call the Microsoft activation number to activate it on the phone. If you can't get the phone activation to come up, right click on the start icon, select Command Prompt (Admin). In the command prompt window run:
slui 4
Would phone activation work though as it snapshot's the PC for future keyless upgrades?
Yes.Would phone activation work though as it snapshot's the PC for future keyless upgrades?
Thanks, for pointing out this alterative. I've been off the forum/s for nearly a year due to health issues. Unfortunately, my computer help skills have suffered from this time away. However, I'm certainly glad we have experts here, such as you, to point out other ways to a fix.Why do you think he is out of luck for the free upgrade just because he does not have a NIC in the computer? Create a USB flash drive or DVD from the downloaded ISO file. Do the upgrade from the flash drive or DVD. Call the Microsoft activation number to activate it on the phone. If you can't get the phone activation to come up, right click on the start icon, select Command Prompt (Admin). In the command prompt window run:
slui 4
John
Just an FYI:
NIC forms a huge part of the hardware ID ( or did in the old days where one could move a network card from one PC to another and the XP OEM key would activate as if the same hardware) - things have changed a lot since though, so maybe it's not as important for digital licensing now. Agree with Navy, phone activation is worth a try.
OK. I got the PCI NIC and it works but now I have another problem.
When I run the Setup for Win10 64-Bit from the Win10 ISO CD it tells me that "This PC can't run Windows 10 with 2 error messages.
It says that the CPU (P4 Celeron Prescott) doesn't support LAHF/SAHF and PrefetchW.
I ran Coreinfo and it showed support for both.
Any ideas why it won't let me upgrade?
Thanks
