Quickly Upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 10 for Free With This PowerShell Script
If you’re reading this, you probably know how to upgrade from one version of Windows to another. While this is a simple process, it’s tedious and boring to watch Windows download and install, and you’ll have to spend more time navigating screens and adjusting settings. Fur.
If you or someone you know clung to Windows 7 until the very end, you should know that your operating system will not receive more security updates after January 15th. Now is the perfect time to finally update your system. systems to Windows 10, especially since it might be free, and because I found a super simple PowerShell script that makes it easy to do automatic updates.
In other words, you start the update process, click a dialog or two at the beginning, and then you can get up and do something else while Windows 10 boots and installs automatically. Your system will reboot when needed, and the next time you need to click, you’ll be minutes away from your new OS. This update couldn’t be easier.
Getting Started with PowerShell in Windows 7 SP1
Since we need PowerShell for this quick little update, and PowerShell is built into any version of Windows starting with Windows 7 SP1, make sure you update your operating system at least up to this point. In other words, just run Windows Update and install whatever it wants you to install (if any).
When you’re ready to start, click the Start button, type Powershell, right-click Windows Powershell and select Run as Administrator.
As a security measure, PowerShell is configured to not run scripts by default until you change a specific registry key. To do this, type this into Powershell and hit Enter when you’re done:
Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
You can now close PowerShell. Yes, it is right.
We type the installation script
Download this .PS1 file to your computer. If it doesn’t exist, or you want to create it manually, open a new text file and copy and paste the following (courtesy of the incredibly useful / r / PowerShell subreddit):
$ dir = ” c: \ temp “
mkdir $ dir
$ webClient = New System.Net.WebClient Object
$ url = ” https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=799445 “
$ file = ” $ ($ dir) \ Win10Upgrade.exe “
$ webClient.DownloadFile ($ url, $ file)
Start-Process -FilePath $ file -ArgumentList ” / quietinstall / skipeula / auto upgrade / copylogs $ dir ” -verb runas
Remove any extra spaces between lines and you may also need to replace those quotes with forward quotes as Kinja changes them to opening and closing quotes by default. Once you’ve done that, close Notepad and save the file with any name, but change its extension to .PS1 (with .TXT).
Running your automatic update
Right-click the new .PS1 file and select Run with PowerShell. You may have to accept at least one prompt to allow Microsoft Windows to make changes to your computer, but that’s about it. The PowerShell window appears and disappears for a short time, and then for a while you will not see anything else.
If you are paranoid like me, you can check if the installation is running by opening the Task Manager and making sure that the “Windows10UpgraderApp.exe” application is running. (You should see this early in the process.) Otherwise, do something else. Your system will automatically reboot when needed and the Windows 10 installation will start without any further action on your part.
You know it’s done when your computer asks you to do something that should look like this:
Basically, there are only one or two screens left to complete, which will only take you 15 seconds. Once you upgrade to Windows 10, you will hopefully notice two things: First, all your data and apps should be where they were originally (since we upgraded from Windows 7, not a clean install). There is no guarantee that everything is there – some programs might be incompatible and could not be taken with you on a trip – but this is a problem that I will discuss in the next article.
However, the upgrade aspect is critical, as you must also have a fully activated version of Windows 10 if you came from an activated version of Windows 7. If not, enter your Windows 7 key – that’s all you need to activate Windows 10, and login to a system with a Microsoft account should simplify the activation process for any subsequent installations.
Remember to reset your PowerShell execution policy.
Remember how we turned off PowerShell and allowed it to run any scripts it wanted? Well, now is a great time to change that in the interest of safety. Open PowerShell as an administrator (as before) and enter the following:
Set-ExecutionPolicy Restricted
Once you’ve done that, you can close PowerShell and start spoofing Windows 10 to your liking. However, you probably won’t need to run Windows Update right away, as you should already have the most recent version of the OS available from Microsoft.