Activating Windows 10 upgrades

[Vertigo]

With the deadline for free upgrades only a month or so away...

I have three computers with full retail Windows 7 Home Premium licences on them. I don't want to upgrade any of these machines to Windows 10 right now but may do in the future.

I've thus been thinking. As the current Windows 10 installation allows a Windows 7 key to be entered, could I simply install a fresh copy of 10 onto a test machine and enter the 7 product key, then wipe and repeat for each of the three licences?

Presumably this would register each 7 key as upgraded to 10 so I could then later upgrade or reinstall any of those three machines? Also, as they're all full retail licences, would the original machines still activate even though the original install was done on a different, test machine?

Ta for any info

 

[Vertigo]

Thanks for the replies but why do I need to do the upgrade on the same machine? Surely, as they're retail licences, I can do the install on a test machine and then it would work later on the original machine just as if I'd upgraded the original and then replace it with a new PC later?

 

[Vertigo]

Why is everyone going on about Win10 being "locked to the hardware".

My Windows 7 licences are retail ones, so I'm entitled to the same when I upgrade to Windows 10. There was a lot of speculation about this initially but Microsoft did confirm that the free upgrade would retain "retail status" and thus you'd be entitled to re-install Windows 10 on a new machine later if you replaced or upgraded it. As that's effectively what I'd be doing, I don't see that there'd be a problem.