How to buy a licence for windows 7?

JonJ678

JonJ678

JonJ678

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I'll lose my msdn subscription in the near future, at which point my windows 7 box will presumably stop working.

I see retail versions at £135 or so, e.g. on this site. Google suggests some people are selling the same for £20, which seems suspect. I remember various upgrade or limited time offers.

I'd like to spend as little as I can on this, but don't want to use (or buy!) a pirate key. Any advice?

Thanks
 
JonJ678 said:
I'll lose my msdn subscription in the near future, at which point my windows 7 box will presumably stop working.

I see retail versions at £135 or so, e.g. on this site. Google suggests some people are selling the same for £20, which seems suspect. I remember various upgrade or limited time offers.

I'd like to spend as little as I can on this, but don't want to use (or buy!) a pirate key. Any advice?

Thanks
Click to expand...

I have MSDN keys from a account my employer no longer uses. My Windows 7 machine still works 2 years later.
 
JonJ678 said:
Google suggests some people are selling the same for £20, which seems suspect. I remember various upgrade or limited time offers.
Click to expand...
Most of these are OEM keys from scrapped PCs. They can be activated over the telephone and will probably work fine however the licence is not transferable and so you don't actually hold a genuine licence.

You can sometimes pickup retail upgrade keys cheaply and these are legitimate so long as you have an old copy of Windows (includes XP or Vista).
 
As last post really - legitimately, you won't.
Microsoft get old versions of Windows out of the channels very quickly once a new version is released.
Any OEM licence you buy will almost certainly work, with a phone call, but won't be legitimate.
MSDN, TechNet - no, no, no
The Windows 10 retail licenses (and I believe OEM) still have downgrade rights - so for example £85 Windows 10 Home retail would give you a Windows 7 Home license.
Don't worry about "bit it isn't Pro" - majority of home users running Pro certainly didn't buy it because they needed the Pro features (it instead was the one they were most likely to find on a dodgy download).
 
JonJ678 said:
I'll lose my msdn subscription in the near future, at which point my windows 7 box will presumably stop working.

I see retail versions at £135 or so, e.g. on this site. Google suggests some people are selling the same for £20, which seems suspect. I remember various upgrade or limited time offers.

I'd like to spend as little as I can on this, but don't want to use (or buy!) a pirate key. Any advice?

Thanks
Click to expand...

i have windows 7 home premium retail that i'll be putting on MM soon, you could check that out. or theres some OEM keys if you look around
 
Last edited:
stoofa said:
The Windows 10 retail licenses (and I believe OEM) still have downgrade rights - so for example £85 Windows 10 Home retail would give you a Windows 7 Home license.
Click to expand...
Retail keys don't have downgrade rights, only OEM and volume; for where you want to run something different than what the hardware came with.
 
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