Well I made it to Windows 10! :)
The media creation tool wouldn't recognize my thumb drive, so I used "rufus" to make a bootable thumb drive. Booted from that but then during the install when I said I was upgrading, it told me to reboot to windows 7, then run the ISO from within Windows 7.
Did...
Can you give details on this? I'm stuck
Just for shits and giggles, I did a direct install of windows 10 (new PC) and tried to activate. No go.
I installed windows 7. Activated. All is good.
I use the in-system Windows update thing to try and go to Windows 10. Twice it's gotten stuck at 99%...