I have an HP Pavilion Desktop that was running Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit. I did the auto upgrade to Windows 10. All seemed to go well except that I had no sound and HP did not offer Windows 10 driver update. I had to go out of town for two days and came back to a loud "tocking" sound that sounded like it was coming from my SSD where the OS is Replied on March 22, 2023. Report abuse. There have been free upgrade offer which if you already upgraded to Windows 10 and activated your Windows and now you roll back to Windows 8, you may upgrade to Windows 10 again. However, if you never upgraded to Windows 10, the free upgrade offer already ended and you will need a product key. If you do not want to upgrade to windows 10 you may continue running the current windows 8.1 on your system. And you will get the support for windows 8.1. However, the support for windows 8 is obsolete now and you would not get any support for Windows 8. You do not need third party anti virus to protect your system as Windows defender is Microsoft says Windows 10 users can still upgrade to Windows 11 for free—at least, if their Windows 10 PCs meet Microsoft’s relatively stringent system requirements for Windows 11. Windows 8.1 keys work in Windows 10, so the upgrade should be free. Windows 10 since version 1511 already accepts valid Windows 7 and 8.1 keys aside from its own. It will reinstall Windows 10. Once you upgrade to Windows 10, your old Windows 8.1 recovery partition becomes inoperable. Backup your computer: When making significant changes to your computer such as updating the operating system, you should always backup. “Originally, he bought a Windows 8.1 Pro license, and I installed Windows 10 with the 8.1 key, (did NOT upgrade).“ - Hate to break it to you but this is considered an upgrade the process you used is identical if you upgraded to windows 10 from within Windows 8.1 or if you install Sindows 10 with a 8.1 key. Officially you can either keep your files and let Windows make a standard upgrade or you can choose a clean install. The second one creates a "windows.old" folder on your hard disk drive. It will contain all your user files, program files, etc. Furthermore, if you simply upgrade, Windows 10 will try reinstall your softwares' Windows 10 I understand that Microsoft will continue supporting Windows 8.1 until January 10th 2023, which is quite a ways away. We currently have about 150 computers in our company that are still running Windows 8.1, the rest have all moved to 10 (excluding the few that are using Windows 7 ESU because of software requirements). sj65.

can windows 8.1 be upgraded to windows 10