Win10 Pro - Digital Activiation - Not Linked to MS Account

x509 said:

That partition is named SELENE, but you don't see it in the image above. APOLLO is the name of my production" Windows 10 partition. (Lenovo730 is the name of my wife's laptop.)
Obviously I omitted a key step. But what?

I've been doing some more swapping of OS on one of my machines recently, and checking my MS Account to see how it's list of devices behaves.

The key step you may have missed out is to sign in to your MS account once you have the OS up and running. You don't have to sign in to the PC with your MS account, just signing into an app like the Store is sufficient.

Seems that a 'device' is defined by the hardware ID or serial number of the PC, not the name your Windows uses for it. On recognising that it's the same machine but with a different name the existing entry in 'My devices' gets updated rather than appearing twice as separate devices.

Bree said:

I'm up to 11 now, but a lot of them are my Hyper-V virtual machines. They still count as a 'machine', just like any other....

Attachment 375078

Interestingly a few years ago, the limit was raised to something like 500 and some people found they could register more than 12 but others remained set as 12. Then MS seemed to quietly drop the new limit.

The registration is really only of any use for physical machines where the mobo has died, so you can transfer the digital licence to a new mobo.

I clear all the virtual machine registrations periodically, as I have all the Hyper-V VMs (not the VHDS) backed up on onedrive. If I delete a VM (virtual equivalent in a sense to the virtual mobo dying), I just restore the VM, and that is in a virtual sense magically bring a dead mobo back to life.

I cannot see any point in transferring the digital licence of one virtual machine to another virtual machine.

To me, if you want to keep vms registered, only do it for activated vms. Doing it for unactivated vms is a complete waste of a registration - what possible use is that?

However, at one time, you could not transfer a digital licence from a virtual machine to a physical machine, but last time I tried, this contraint seems to have been removed. I did think about keeping a couple of vms registered in case I got a new physical device without a licence (key code or digital), then I realised I can re-register any vm again anyway.

So, registration of VMs does not really gain anything. However, I do try and ensure my main physical machines remain registered.

cereberus said:

.....The registration is really only of any use for physical machines where the mobo has died, so you can transfer the digital licence to a new mobo. .....I cannot see any point in transferring the digital licence of one virtual machine to another virtual machine....

....So, registration of VMs does not really gain anything. However, I do try and ensure my main physical machines remain registered.

In fact, I did without an MS Account for many years, relying solely on local accounts and there being a digital licence for each machine on the MS activation servers.

All my Windows 10/11 VMs are activated. A year ago I upgraded my Host machine to a newer more powerful one. All bar one of my existing VMs could be exported from the old Host and imported into the new one, preserving their activation. That one VM that couldn't was the reason I finally gave in and created myself an MS account. The very first use of which was to transfer activation from one VM to another.

Bree said:

...it was trivially easy to boot the imported .vhdx on a new VM created from scratch on the new Host.... I could just attach it to another VM. But it did not activate as the installed key was the generic Home key and not the W7 Home key I had used to activate the original VM.

....I signed in to the activated VM on the old host, then switched it from a local account to a Microsoft account. Then I shut it down and signed in to the unactivated clone VM on the new Host. Running the Activation Troubleshooter and selecting 'I have changed hardware' enabled me to transfer activation to this new clone VM.

Inadvertently created a Hyper-V Shielded VM


I still use only local accounts on all my machines, virtual or physical. But I do now allow a few apps to sign in to my MS account, like the Store or the Widgets in Windows 11.

NavyLCDR said:

The digital license is not tied to partitions. It is tied to the computer via the unique hardware identification. Multiple partitions will have the same digital license.

Ah. What do you know? I know I didn't know that. Different from the information in post #16 above.

So can someone just willy-nilly create and activate additional windows partitions on a system with a digital license?

x509 said:

So can someone just willy-nilly create and activate additional windows partitions on a system with a digital license?

As long as it's the same edition (Home or Pro) then yes. A digital license for Home will not activate an install of Pro (though a Pro digital license will activate Home as it's a lower edition, though why you'd want to downgrade like that is a moot point). It's not even tied to just Windows 10, the digital license is the same for both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Bree said:

As long as it's the same edition (Home or Pro) then yes. A digital license for Home will not activate an install of Pro (though a Pro digital license will activate Home as it's a lower edition, though why you'd want to downgrade like that is a moot point). It's not even tied to just Windows 10, the digital license is the same for both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Wowzers. I guess Microsoft isn't really looking to make money off people who already have an activated license.

Does this "flexibility" apply to VMs created on the same physical system?

I guess at this point I know far more about Windows digital licensing that I ever imagined I would ever need to.

Moderators: Just wondering. Should some of the fine points in this thread be added to the right tutorial?

x509 said:

Does this "flexibility" apply to VMs created on the same physical system?

As NavyLCDR says, a VM is a machine like any other and needs a digital license in its own right. It does not piggy-back on the host machines digital license. For that reason if you ever activate a VM do NOT just delete it when finished using it else you'll lose the digital license. Save it for re-use later.