Win10 upgrade and a retail purchase of Win10 Pro- not the same.

alphanumeric said:

Not every motherboard is going to have an embedded key by the way. If you buy a motherboard by itself like that it won't. It's only if its sold in a system by an OEM like Dell or ASUS etc. They modify it adding the Windows Product code etc.

Thanks, another thing I did not know. Perhaps I never saw an MSDM table (but I thought I did, heh) as I never bought an OEM computer (except my son's MacBook Pro retina) . Of course, when I went to do a clean install on my computer with 8.1, I would always supply the serial number (as I would write it down beforehand). I never knew about the start of the use of the hash code so I never tried skipping the serial number. Actually, I remember that on older installs, you needed to put in a serial number or it would just stop the install. Going from Windows For Workgroups 311 to Win10 has been a journey through MS's myriad product activation schemes.

John Pombrio said:

Going from Windows For Workgroups 311 to Win10 has been a journey through MS's myriad product activation schemes.

Remember TRSDOS boot discs for the TRS-80 (and cassette tapes if you couldn't afford the expansion interface)? That's how old I am :-}

John Pombrio said:

Thanks, another thing I did not know. Perhaps I never saw an MSDM table (but I thought I did, heh) as I never bought an OEM computer (except my son's MacBook Pro retina) . Of course, when I went to do a clean install on my computer with 8.1, I would always supply the serial number (as I would write it down beforehand). I never knew about the start of the use of the hash code so I never tried skipping the serial number. Actually, I remember that on older installs, you needed to put in a serial number or it would just stop the install. Going from Windows For Workgroups 311 to Win10 has been a journey through MS's myriad product activation schemes.

Key prompt or no key prompt depends on what version of Windows your installing and the hardware your installing it on.

Mark Phelps said:

I understand what the EULA says -- but I fail to see how that can even be possible! I mean, HOW are you going to "transfer the software" from one Windows PC to another?

You could make a backup image of PC #1 and "restore" that image to PC #2. But, after that, most likely, PC #2 won't boot because of driver differences. So, this method likely won't work.

Or ... you could do a clean-install of PC #2 from a Win10 ISO -- but this would be to a PC that had never been activated through an Upgrade, so as we've all read now (probably hundreds of times!), this will not activate. So, this method likely won't work, either.

If MS allowed us to activate Win10 using a product key, then we could use the second method and simply enter the product key -- but they don't allow that method.

So basically, the statement in the EULA is, at this time, just BS -- because you can't actually do it.

If you buy a full Retail Version it will come with a product code, and you could transfer that way. That's what I've been saying all alone, because the free upgrade uses a generic key, transferring it is near impossible. Even if it is a Retail version. This may be by design, thus the "life of the device." Buy a full retail version and you don't have that restriction. All of my PC's are upgraded to 10 Pro so I can't test moving 10, it's going to activate anyway. For me its just a theory at this point.