Solved Upgrade for multiple PCs

I am psyched about the $40 upgrade offer Microsoft is offering for Windows 8 Pro. I plan to take advantage of that. My wife and I each have a desktop and a laptop. Yes, you heard right. Two people, four Windows computers, four upgrades. This sort of leads into my question. We do not have real, wired high-speed Internet available where we live. We do have satellite high-speed, if you can really call it that, but we are bandwidth capped daily to about 500 MB. That's going to make it really hard to upgrade one computer, let alone four.

Then I saw that you can create bootable media once the download is complete. I'm hopeful that we could take one of our laptops to the local library and download the upgrade using their connection, then burn the upgrade to a DVD and use that to upgrade all of our computers. I figured each would have it's own product key. Then I heard that they're doing away with product keys altogether so I don't know if my plan will work or not.

Also, since your upgrade/product is tied to a Microsoft account, can I even have four Windows upgrades tied to one account?

This whole new approach leaves me with a lot of unanswered questions.

Does anyone out there know the answers to any of them yet? If anyone has any answers, I'd really love to hear them because I'm really hopeful that we'll be able to take advantage of this generous upgrade offer.

Thanks for any information anyone may be able to provide.

- Byron Followell

You would need to purchase an upgrade for each machine, but you'd still only need one set of media to do the installation. Your license is tied to the product key used to do the upgrade, not the disk (or USB stick) itself. You could download whatever media you needed from your library, put the ISO on a DVD (or use supplied tools to make a USB key installer) and then use that 4 times, submitting one of the four keys acquired with one of each of your purchases from a reputable brick-and-mortar or online store. Again, it's not specifically the product medium used to do the install, it's the product key you use when you are prompted - only that has to be different. You can use the same upgrade media on all 4 machines, as long as you've purchased 4 separate upgrade licenses.

Well, that's what I was hoping for. I just saw something in an article somewhere, I can't recall where at the moment, that said something about Microsoft doing away with product keys. Anyway, as long as I can do that, I could always download the update from the library or someplace like that and then burn it and use it on the others after I purchase the updates for them like you said.

Thanks for putting my mind at ease.

I'm really looking forward to getting that good a deal on the new OS. That's about as low as I've ever seen a Microsoft upgrade and I want to take full advantage of it.

- Byron