Need to reverse OS downgrade - back to W10

[EZ-PC]

I guess I bought this PC about 4-5 years ago (and it's still serving me well).  It came with Windows 10... but had the option to downgrade to W7 pro (which I did).  However, I seem to think that there was always an option to reverse the downgrade and go back to W10 Pro at any point during the product's life.  Does that sound feasible?  Is it still an option to do some kind of internal reverse of the downgrade - or will I have to buy a new copy of W10?

Many thanks for your help.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@EZ-PC 

The good news is that if the PC was running Win10 before you installed Win7, then it will already be activated for Win10 with Microsoft and once you do the Upgrade and go online, it will contact the MS servers and reactivate.

To do the Upgrade, I recommend the following:

1) Use this link to download and create Win10 install media: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

2) insert that into your PC (do NOT boot from it), find the folder containing the media, select the setup.exe file, right-click that and select Run as Administrator.  This will start an in-place Upgrade which could then take a couple of hours to complete.

[EZ-PC]

@WAWood

 Many thanks for the rapid response and the detailed advice.

I guess I should maybe clarify one point about my PC... I've never actually run Windows 10 on the PC. It came supplied with W10 Pro (but also had W7 Pro loaded on it by HP - so the user could use 'downgrade rights' to run the PC with W7 instead of W10). I used the downgrade rights immediately - so the PC has never run W10.  Does that make any difference?  Does your advice still stand?

Again, many thanks.

[EZ-PC]

@WAWood

Many thanks for the advice.

I used the link you provided... and upgraded the machine that I used to access the link (so there was no need to create media).

One issue I had was…

During the process there were 4 or 5 times in the process where the screen said the PC was checking for updates.  These all took a long time... but, worse still, they sometimes seemed to lock (with nothing proceeding).  Some people suggested rebooting and then restarting the upgrade – but, to me, that sounded like it could be risky.  So I did some more searching and it appears that the 'lock' happens when the upgrade program is searching for updates - and simultaneously 'Windows Update' will launch and also start looking for updates.  This results in both programs blocking each other.  The advice was to go into Services and stop Windows Update (as and when necessary... because Windows Update will auto restart at various times). Having done that, everything went OK. No files appear to have been lost... most settings and progs retained (apart from stuff that doesn't work with W10). 

Thanks again for your help.