Stefan Mileschin

Microsoft began rolling out of the Windows 10 upgrade to existing users of Windows 8.1 and Windows 7. The upgrade process is handled by a "reservation system," which lets you tell Microsoft in advance that you intend to upgrade, using the Get Windows 10 (GWX) app that's been sticking out in your system-tray over the past month, which looks like the Windows logo. Once "reserved," Windows slowly fetches installation files of Windows 10, and stores them into a temporary directory. When all the installation files and drivers specific to your hardware have been downloaded, the app notifies you that the upgrade can begin at your command.

The upgrade process itself is zero-intervention, and happens much like an iOS or Android OTA upgrade. Once it's installed, you get to customize a handful things, and then you're done. GWX may notify you that your upgrade is ready to begin any time today. If you've not reserved your upgrade, you can still do so, but you may not get to upgrade just yet, maybe over the next "few weeks or months," according to Microsoft. With an estimated 350 million installations queued up for the upgrade, GWX will not be able to fetch the installation files and drivers by maxing out your Internet bandwidth. It will take its own time, as Microsoft servers shed their bandwidth load.

There doesn't appear to be a strict correlation between reservation and upgrade availability. For example, we reserved upgrades for two of our PCs around the same time. The PC with the simpler hardware, programs, and settings, finished with the upgrade, while another one is still queued up. Microsoft will formally launch Windows 10 in media events spread around the world.

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