Windows 10 Activation after a Major Hardware Change

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Can windows 10 be activated after you do a major change to your hardware such as motherboard and hard drive? Why not? If it cannot be activated, it is a rip-off for Microsoft to charge you multiple times on the same computer. But it can be activated, what will happen if you migrate the license to multiple computers and that will make activating unlimited computers with one license purchase possible, and Microsoft will be losing money. This appears to be very confusing. We happen to experience such a dilemma when building two PCs: one with successful license migration, and the other failed. For our two cases, we were not doing a major hardware change on the original computer, we were building two completely new computers with an old computer with activated Windows 10 standby. The first build used the an M2 SSD with cloned hard drive data from the standby computer. Windows was activated on the spot while the standby computer was not affected. So, we had two activated computers with the same license. That was a saving of $120 - the cost of purchasing a new Windows 10 Home license. Our second build was done several weeks later. It was another completely new computer. Again, we used an M2 SSD with cloned hard drive data from the standby computer. The steps were followed exactly like our first build. However, there was no luck this time. Windows were not activated no matter how many times we repeated the process. The message on the Control Panel's activation page read something like "The license has been used". While reading a few articles on license migration after major hardware change, I understood the principle: the activated license info is printed in the motherboard. Upon a motherboard change, such info is definitely lost, and that's why you need to reactivate it. That's why we failed the second build. But how to explain our first build while the activation appeared to be carried over to the new computer automatically and we did not do any re-activation at all? I believe the trick was on the first login event with a same Microsoft account of the standby computer during the initialization of the first build. Microsoft detected the same login, which might trigger the re-activation automatically. However, if such change was done again in a short period of time (in our case, it was several weeks), it was not recognized as a regular major hardware change, because no one will upgrade a motherboard in several weeks, the license was marked as used and there was nothing you can do about it except purchasing a new license. This was our Windows 10 activation experience after many hours of tries. Obviously Microsoft will not tell you this, and you learn through your own tries.


Published from: Pennsylvania US
Liked by: Andy Tang 

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