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Yes, this time it's for real! But.. there's no flunch (free-lunch); after the first year or so M$ is going to want annual access to your purse for ongoing "maintenance". The upside to this is that they now promise to be good, and stop selling us the same code over and over again in different wrappers. It's claimed that W10 will be the very last version of Windows, and that (as long as you subscribe of course) they'll update it for ever and a day. This might have been innovative if Google hadn't already being doing this with Chrome OS for quite some time. What it really means is that M$ have seen the writing on the wall, and decided that the only way to avoid more customers defecting to free operating systems is inertia and incremental selling. In recent years fewer and fewer people have been buying retail versions of Windows, preferring to stick with what they've got until they buy a new machine.