I'm currently trying to rescue a laptop from another expat in the village, she turned it off using the off button while it was downloading windows upgrades. The result is the computer will not get past the boot screen without errors.
I can't get it to reload from its partition, seems that is corrupt as well. I gave up on win7 seven yesterday and today even though I have deleted all the partitions using a dos command on a pendrive and reformmated the disk I can't get an operating system to load.
Tomorrow its going to be rip out the drive and slave it into my laptop, hopefully I can get full access and sort it out that way. But Windows 10 ? Let me deal with this first!
That one will not get the free win 10 upgrade unless it has a valid win 7 or 8. If win 10 is installed without using the upgrade option, it will consider itself a "clean" install, and will demand a code which will cost real money before loading.
The circumstances highlight one thing that makes me very uncertain about win 10 - you, as the PC owner, don't get the option to select where, when and what updates are applied. Given that M$ decided that the entire world was populated solely by portable handheld devices when they cobbled up win 8, this update policy is stupid. The scene - portable device with a low battery and a wifi connection decides to do an update just as you are about to board your flight. The probable result is one device that will be converted into a paperweight.
I will be waiting until the dust has settled a bit. While there are good reports of win 10 from the beta testers, the general public has not done the full customer testing to find the more subtle problems.