Free Windows 10 upgrade offer via CSP

Twan van Beers
17 May, 2017

Most of us know that there was an offer from Microsoft to upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1 back in 2016, however most of us don’t know that you can still get a ‘free’ upgrade today!

Microsoft announced a new offer in January 2017 for any customers who have a Windows 10 Enterprise subscription via the Cloud Solution Provider program (and yes Nero Blanco are a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and can help you get this subscription, currently from £5.30/month) This allows anyone with a Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5 or a Secure Productive Enterprise (SPE) E3/E5 subscription to upgrade their Windows 7 or 8.1 machine (and there is no mention of this being limited to certain editions…)

One of the key paragraphs is

The Windows 10 upgrade licenses issued as part of this process are perpetual and associated with the device. This means the license will not expire or be revoked if the customer chooses to end their Windows cloud subscription in the CSP program.

This means that you could get a Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5 subscription from us, upgrade your Windows 7/8.1 machines, terminate the subscription and keep the Windows 10 Pro OS on your machine and be fully licensed! Now of course we think that Windows 10 Enterprise is a great improvement for organizations but you don’t need to keep it. The only thing I am not sure about is how do you prove that you are fully licensed to an auditor, no problem if you retain the Windows 10 Enterprise subscription of course, but if you cancel the subscription and the OS goes back to Windows 10 Pro edition, then what is there to show an auditor…

One caveat is that the Windows 10 Enterprise subscription has a 12 month duration, however at this time there are no cancellation penalties if you terminate before the 12 months. You won’t have to pay for the full 12 months either!

How awesome is that!!! Happy Upgrading…

Twan van Beers

Twan is a senior consultant with over 30 years of experience. He has a wide range of skills including Messaging, Active Directory, SQL, Networking and Firewalls. Twan loves to write scripts and get deep and dirty into debugging code, in order to understand and resolve the most complex of problems.