Activation after clone to SSD?

Sorry if this has been covered.

laptop has Win 10 that was an free upgrade from Windows 7. If I clone to SSD will activation remain? I know if hardware changes will be an issue. I will backup key just in case, not sure it is needed. later hopefully a fresh install.

I have used Easeus and Acronis in the past with Windows 7, always with bootable media to do the clone. first time cloning windows 10, was thinking about Macrium, just never tried it. Put the new SSD in place and boot to the HDD as external?

thx

The Product Key won't do you any good for activating Windows 10 because it is the same generic Product Key that everyone gets from an upgrade. Windows 10 should remain activated and a subsequent clean install should activate itself. You can enter the generic product key when asked, or "skip" or "do this later" when asked for a product key during a clean install. But if you do not have an activation stored on MS activation servers (and you should), the generic product key will not cause activation.

You can use Macrium Reflect Free in three different ways:

1. Make a Macrium Reflect rescue media (USB or DVD) - and boot from that. Then you can either clone directly from the HDD to the SSD with both connected at the same time - or create an image file from the HDD and then restore the image file to SSD.

2. Install Macrium Reflect and then create a boot menu item to boot into Reflect off the HDD instead of all the way into Windows 10. Then either two options for cloning - either directly or through an image file.

3. Install Macrium Reflect and just run it from within Windows 10.

The one thing that you will want to do is make sure to boot the computer at least once with only the SSD connected. This will make sure that everything required to boot is on the SSD and it is stand alone for the OS. Then after you reconnect the HDD - make sure that bios is still set to boot from the SSD and does not revert back to the HDD.

Update:

Macrium 6 Free didn't have a "Clone" feature, so I made and image of the 750gb HDD that had total 100gb (OS+Data), then tried to restore to 500GB SSD and just got error "not enough room on target disk". I did try to figure out to how to resize, nothing made sense.

I put in an Acronis 2014 Boot CD with the SSD in place and the original HDD as USB 3.0 external and it cloned it perfectly to the smaller SSD. Activation remained.