The party's over. After seven years of looking the other way, Microsoft has finally announced that it's closing the loophole that allowed PCs running Windows 7 and Windows 8.x to upgrade for free.

After selecting the version, the script will download the associated Windows 10 Media Creation Tool and other support files and automatically launch the program in Windows 10. Depending on what ...

Then that loophole was shut down, too. What Microsoft never said was that the Windows 7/8 transition was never actually closed. Users, if they chose, could still upgrade their older PCs to Windows 10.

So this means that you can perform an in-place upgrade to move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, but you will have to perform a Clean install to move from Windows 8.1/7 to Windows 11.

There's no change to Windows 10's end-of-support date, which falls on October 14, 2025. Microsoft states: "January 31, 2023 will be the last day this Windows 10 download is offered for sale.