Yeah usually there are many ways to upgrade. But at $39 it may be that you can only upgrade immediately on line without an option to save the upgrade to disk. That is, go to upgrade, pay the fee, click ok and it immediately starts to upgrade your machine with no option to save it to disk.

That's my question. Once you pay, is it a forced upgrade?

Since this upgrade price will only be available for a few months it seems to me it "could" be a waste of money if you can't create a copy. If you have a problem and have to reinstall... you can't.