Originally Posted By: Gordon Scott
The best workaround I've found so far is to run the older Windows in a virtual machine, usually VirtualBox. It's quite feasible to run older OSs in a VirtualBox on the newer hardware. I'm not so confident about newer OSs in a VirtualBox on older hardware as I've not tried that.

In some cases there are issues doing that, as the OS may require some specific CPU instruction sets (SSSE, MMX, etc) and I don't believe VirtualBox emulates those instructions (and if it did they would be very slow). If the hardware is capable of running the guest OS, I don't think it's an issue for the guest to be a newer OS than the host.


Originally Posted By: Gordon Scott
When I was forced to change my Win7 on this machine to Win10, I discovered that MS offered the free upgrade from Win7/8/8.1 for many months after the official deadline. They _may_ do that again.

Many sources on the internet believe that Microsoft will continue this, however nothing is official.


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