7 home premium upgraded from vista home premium. now can I upgrade again?

[seanincali]

hey everyone.

i have a dell inspiron laptop that i bought in 2009 that came with windows vista home premium 64 bit.

when vista support went away, i upgraded to windows 7 home premium 64 bit and it went pretty smooth.

then i had a virus that put a period at the end of the registry for the "explorer.exe." which caused the windows to load a blank black screen on start up. so I thought my laptop was a toast and bought a new hp laptop.

then that had to get service about a month ago, so i started to looking into fixing my old windows 7 machine. i was able to find a post about the corrupted registry entry and was able to resurrect my windows 7 by deleting the spurious period at the end.

and now that the support for the 7 is going away, i would like to look into the option of upgrading this windows 7 laptop that was upgraded from vista to windows 8.1

is that advisable?

last time i was able to find a downloadable image of windows 7 from microsoft website, and then buy an activation key on ebay for cheap. but i'm not having the same luck at the moment.

any suggestions would be welcome.

 

[Slavic]

For an answer, you can look at the neighbour forum thread:
Is there such a thing as an "In Place Upgrade" from W7 to W8.1?

 

[seanincali]

For an answer, you can look at the neighbour forum thread:
Is there such a thing as an "In Place Upgrade" from W7 to W8.1?

but that deals with upgrading windows 7 to 8 or 10

not windows vista what was upgraded to windows 7 and then being upgraded to windows 8 or 10.

is there a difference?

 

[Slavic]

No difference. If you already have Windows 7 installed, its history doesn't matter, like was it installed on clean PC or upgraded from XP or Vista. It's Windows 7 now, it can be upgraded to 8.1 directly with keeping only the user files, or via the intermediate upgrade to 8 if you need to keep not only docs, but also all settings and installed programs.

 

[Bree]

Each version can be upgraded to the next. The fact that you started out with Vista is irrelevant now you have upgraded to W7. That can be upgraded to 8 or 10.

I had a dead XP machine with installed software I wanted to keep, the only working part left was its HDD. I took an image of that and restored it to a VM. I then successfully upgraded it in stages: first XP > Vista, then Vista > W7, finally W7 > W10.

 

[seanincali]

ok thanks everyone. i'll go look into upgrading to windows 10 now

 

[Bree]

ok thanks everyone. i'll go look into upgrading to windows 10 now

The sister site Ten Forums has a tutorial for that.

Upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7 for Free

 

[seanincali]

thank you. doing this right now on my hp laptop using a remote desktop app, trustviewer. i love having two computers with a remote desktop app. not sure if trustviower is reputable though. so far so good.