BlackThorny: I know MS allows to revert back to 7 within a month after an upgrade to 10, will it revert to 7 or 7 with service pack 1?
Is there away to guarantee eligibility for a free windows 10 license for a clean install without an actual upgrade of current win7 system?
Arkose: The upgrade process keeps a copy of the previous Windows installation, so you will go back to whatever patched state you had.
The only official route is to upgrade from within the previous operating system and then optionally return to the old operating system afterwards (there might be some way around this but I have not looked into that).
Note that the Windows 10 upgrade notifications will apparently be removed after July 29, so if you did return to the old version and wanted to upgrade again beyond that date you would start the upgrade from
Get Windows 10 instead.
If Microsoft would just have allowed us to run a validation tool that registers our hardware for the Windows 10 upgrade and the let us proceed with a clean install to a new SSD, I would personally have installed it on over a dozen computers by now.
But because they insist that I need to download the upgrade separately for each computer and then install it beside the existing OS before I can finally replace the drive and do the clean install, I have not upgraded a single PC to Windows 10 as I have better things to do than be stuck on a friend's house for who knows how many hours waiting for the download to finish when I should have been able to just switch his HDD with a new SSD, put the installation CD on the disc drive and have the system ready for use in a far more predictable timeframe.
Windows 8 also needs to be upgraded to 8.1 before the Windows 10 upgrade can be installed, so I ended up installing a spare copy of Windows 7 on my notebook's new SSD instead of doing an unnecessary double upgrade.