With Windows 7 support ending, my shop has been getting a number of clients coming in to have their systems upgraded from 7 to 10. My question is, should we sell them Windows 10 or should we try one of those techniques which appears to still work allowing you to upgrade from Windows 7 to 10 for free? I mean officially, MS has ended the free upgrade so my thing is to sell the customer Windows 10. Can this be considered wrong?
No it should not be considered wrong. Next even if you sell 'em Win10 you are investing time, if you are doing it right backing up data and system in case of driver absence. Time is money so charge for the install.
I don’t charge them for a windows 10 license. I just charge them my labour for installing it for them. No different than a reload of windows (except you keep all their apps and docs)
Understood - but here is the thing, my store sells Win 10. So we’re stuck with should we sell them the product OR carry out the free upgrade and just charge for hourly rate for working on the system.
I guess the choice comes down to personal preference and morals. I cannot justify charging my client a license to upgrade when Microsoft has been giving (unofficially) free upgrades. In my eyes it would be stealing (charging them for a license and then just free upgrading them) or overcharging them for nothing (purchase a legit license and use it to upgrade).
Regardless of Microsoft not charging a license fee for an upgrade to Win 10 you are expending your time. Time is irreplaceable so you should charge for your time and expense of any on-site work.
I charge a fixed fee for my time to ugrade to win 10. I dont add on the licence cost. On oler laptops or pcs i would also recommend they upgrade to an ssd which gives the older machines a great performance boost. Again i would have a fixed fee for labour and parts for a 120gb or 240gb ssd.
Its your time, elec , know how & risk right? If a client asks me to call their ISP / who ever, I charge for the call ($25 p/h) so why not charge for this? I charge $50-90 to do the upgrade. Part of this (before even sending a quote) is to test the HDD with HDsentinal or the SSD with SSDlife + manufacturer tools.
If SSD is good great, if HDD is good I quote on an SSD (Samsung) + W7 upgrade to W10. I make a clone before starting & a clone after the job is done & keep these for 2 weeks / give the client a copy on the existing HDD / upload the images to a cloud if possible.
I also offer a 30day full refund on the SSD if they’re not happy. Obv no one has been unhappy 
Charge for your time, never cut yourself out for something that can be seen from our side of the table as a quick and easy thing to do. Customers need to pay for your knowledge and skills that have made this task “easy and quick”.
In my former shop we sold windows OS as well and it sometimes was a struggle to get people to pay for the new OS upgrade but others would not bat an eye.
I always air on the side of caution when it comes to the OS. If your clients get audited by MS a lot it might be better to offer the purchase so you have receipts for those times where you will need to validate your versions.
It depends on everything. A lot of folks just had been forced to the windows 10 upgrade by the patch going out so I would assume leniency from MS would still go on but that is purely a guess.