Windows for Free

In 2013, after a lot of effort, I bought myself a new laptop. It was a new fangled (for the time) UltraBook. I’ve used it on and off for years, lent it around the family and last week I popped a 40 quid SSD into it with the aim of speeding it up a bit. That worked a treat. Then I discovered that someone I know needs a laptop to work from home. And of course their employer won’t/can’t supply one.

So on Thursday I took the 7 year old machine from 0 to fully configured laptop in about 30 minutes. By the time I’d finished I had a newly setup machine with a new Microsoft Outlook email account. At no point did I enter any licence keys and it just worked. Just a tiny bit of fixing up because of a faulty touch screen.

The machine is well powerful enough and apparently it works a treat. Apple make a big fuss about the way they support their new smartphones for five years. Big deal. This was a seven year old laptop and it just worked. The Windows 10 installation was a breeze, I even had Cortana talking me through it.

If you have an old laptop that is not doing much, buy yourself a cheap SSD (I got a 250G one from Amazon for around forty quid) and slap a free copy of Windows Home on it. If you’re a student you can then top that off with a free copy of Microsoft Office 365.