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Been working with Intune more and more lately and came across a neat way to upgrade Windows 7 In-Place to Windows 10 with a simple PowerShell script that you can push out or run as needed to get the job down to a few clicks and I wanted to share.
This script will also update Windows 10 to the latest Feature Update available if needed.

  • Total time: 1 min
  • Estimated cost: None
  • Tools used: PowerShell

Step 1: Core upgrade EXE

Microsoft has been kind enough to provide you with a quick in place upgrade tool available via the download link below. This will quickly get you rolled into Windows 10 if those devices are capable or upgrade existing Windows 10 to the latest feature build.

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=799445

Running this EXE as administrator via cmd line with arguments is the key to a clean script without user prompts so this exe has 4 switches we will be using.
/quietinstall
/skipeula
/auto upgrade
/copylogs

Step 2: Script

$d = 'c:\win10exe' 
mkdir $d 
$ComObj = New-Object System.Net.WebClient 
$exedl = “https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=799445" 
$exe = “$($d)\Win10Upgrade.exe” 
$ComObj.DownloadFile($exedl,$exe) 
Start-Process -FilePath $exe -ArgumentList “/quietinstall /skipeula /auto upgrade /copylogs $d”

Pretty simple script that gets the job down to a quickly repeatable process. Hope it helps in the coming months for those EOL upgrades.

29 Spice ups
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Nice! Thanks for this, does it still work now the free upgrade has expired? Presumably we’ll need digital licenses for each machine already? Sorry for the questions!

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I purposely left out the licensing discussion on this and left it to the owner to make sure they are legal.

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This is awesome! I need to find a victi…er…system to test this on.

Phill7895…if your system has a legit license, then YES the free upgrade still works I upgraded a machine from 8 Pro to 10 Pro yesterday.

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Should “/quiteinstall” be “/quietinstall” ? Not an expert in CLI, PS, or scripts, so checking. Thanks!

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Corrected quiet as per the comment above
how many more words…ok now I can post

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Hi, Thanks for the article.
I found when running this that the Win10Upgrade.exe only installs a ‘Windows10Upgrade’ folder and then nothing else. To actually get the upgrade to get started, I then had to run the ‘Windows10UpgraderApp.exe’ file in this folder (with the same switches as the upgrade exe). This complicates the whole thing because it then becomes a two stage process. Have you seen this? Or am I doing something wrong?

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I’m running into the same issue as the previous person…

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Still works for me, make sure you are running PowerShell as System or local Administrator

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I’m getting an error that the exe is not a valid win32 application on Windows 7.