V2P Tutorial needed!!

nkaufman said:

Kari - Thanks for your assistance in this. I was able to create Win-10 images for my set of retail Win-7 licenses. Hopefully I'll be able to restore images to physical machines in the next couple of months when I'll be getting some new machines.

You are wecome :)

Don't forget us, come back to tell how it went after doing first physical machine.

Maybe I got confused by the various replies but it seems to me a key point was missed long ago.

"I have a few "retail" Win-7 licenses that I need to upgrade to Win-10 before Microsoft yanks free upgrade.

Was looking at creating VMs with Win-7, upgrading these VMs to Win-10 and then use V2P to move these VMs to physical boxes".

Windows 7 keys are not converted to windows 10 keys. You would get a digital licence for each vm. If you sysprep etc the install to move to a physical machine, the install will not activate. Additionally the new trouble shooter that does enable digital licence transfer does not allow transfer of digital licences between a vm and a physical machine.

So if the intent is still to do the text in bold, it will not work.

nkaufman said:

Are you saying that Win-7 retail licenses used to install Win-10 does NOT allow users to move Windows to another PC? That was the basis of the whole exercise.

Per Kari's post (#6 of this thread), one can, if one has Win-7 retail key, move the OS to another machine and that might need a call to MS for activation. Hopefully others can share their thoughts and/or experiences on this.

Please notice that the post of mine you are referring to was posted on July 19^th when we still had almost two weeks to go until the official end of Microsoft's free upgrade offer. This offer made it possible for users to activate a clean installed Windows 10 with a valid Windows 7 or 8.1 product key.

Anyway, even after the free upgrade offer the difference between an OEM and retail licenses remains the same: OEM is not transferable, whereas a retail license is. Since Windows 10 version 1607 (build 14393, insiders already from build 14371) there has been a new, easier method to transfer a Windows 10 retail license with Activation Troubleshooter, making phone activation mentioned in referred post in most cases unnecessary. See tutorial: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

Kari

Kari said:

Please notice that the post of mine you are referring to was posted on July 19^th when we still had almost two weeks to go until the official end of Microsoft's free upgrade offer. This offer made it possible for users to activate a clean installed Windows 10 with a valid Windows 7 or 8.1 product key.

Anyway, even after the free upgrade offer the difference between an OEM and retail licenses remains the same: OEM is not transferable, whereas a retail license is. Since Windows 10 version 1607 (build 14393, insiders already from build 14371) there has been a new, easier method to transfer a Windows 10 retail license with Activation Troubleshooter, making phone activation mentioned in referred post in most cases unnecessary. See tutorial: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

Kari

The subtle point in all this is that the activation troubleshooter does not allow transfer of digital licences between physical machines and vms - try it and you will see it refuses to let you do that. Interestingly it does not matter if licence is in vmware or hyper-v for example - they will transfer.

I do not know why it has this restriction. I suspect it was to prevent exactly what OP is trying to do ie to stop "dealers" holding on to lots of keys to upgrade en masse using vms as a loophole.

cereberus said:

The subtle point in all this is that the activation troubleshooter does not allow transfer of digital licences between physical machines and vms - try it and you will see it refuses to let you do that. Interestingly it does not matter if licence is in vmware or hyper-v for example - they will transfer.

I do not know why it has this restriction. I suspect it was to prevent exactly what OP is trying to do ie to stop "dealers" holding on to lots of keys to upgrade en masse using vms as a loophole.

I didn't know that, thanks for clarifying it.

nkaufman said:

Are you saying that Win-7 retail licenses used to install Win-10 does NOT allow users to move Windows to another PC? That was the basis of the whole exercise.

Per Kari's post (#6 of this thread), one can, if one has Win-7 retail key, move the OS to another machine and that might need a call to MS for activation. Hopefully others can share their thoughts and/or experiences on this.

You do not seem to understand the basis of digital licences. When you upgrade you get a digital licence tied to mobo id. You do not get a new 10 key. If you use a key finder like showkeyplus, it will reveal a generic key that is the same for all users of windows 10 (different key for each edition ie all home users get same key).
transfer
Moreover you can only have one digital licence per pc per windows edition. So if you had 5 windows 7 home licences, you could only creare one digital licence on one pc if the free upgrade was still permitted.

It is even more subtle with linking the digital licence to your MS account to facilitate licence transfer as you can only link one one digital licence to one ms account per pc.