Sorry ... yet another windows activation question.

I got some useful help here recently about how to update an old toshiba laptop, but before I got around to doing the update my daughter decided she wanted to update her Samsung series 9 laptop from win7 home premium to win10 home. I was helping her with that when a circuit breaker tripped and we lost power. (The battery needs replacing obviously). It crashed the computer in a bad way. I tried doing a factory reset, but it said that the recovery partition wasn't valid. Samsung support said my only option was to bring it to the nearest service center (800mi away) and pay to have the disk restored (since it is now out of warranty). But we didn't have time for that, so I did a clean install by booting (UEFI) to a win10 home install USB stick that I created with the media tool. (I probably should have restored the C drive from the last image backup on the external USB drive made with Acronis, but I didn't think of that). Windows 10 is now running great but it won't seem to activate. Perhaps I should have known this, but I thought people were telling me that microsoft now allows you to use the old windows 7 key to activate windows 10. This was an OEM windows 7, so maybe not?? Before starting I had saved the windows key using Belarc Advisor, so we have that (The key must be saved in the bios). We even tried entering that product key manually, but windows 10 still does not activate. (It gives an error code 0x80041023). I suppose we could still go back to the last win7 image, but there is no time for that since she is on a plane tomorrow morning to go back to school). Also she has already spent too much time configuring win10 to give up on it now. So will we be forced to pay the $120 ransom to microsoft to get a valid license or is there some other way? Also is it really worth $120 to activate? Can you just run it for as long as you want without activation?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

~Paul

I don't have an answer for you, but I have a question :
You said " Before starting I had saved the windows key using Belarc Advisor"
Why ? This is a laptop with OEM Win 7 Home Premium. The product key has to be at the bottom of the laptop. Please have a look.
If you find the key at the bottom of the laptop, compare that with the one retrieved by Belarc.
If they do not match, use the one at the bottom of the laptop for activation.

[QUOTE]Another possible root of your problem may be that your USB stick has WIn10 build 10240. I believe the ability to directly enter your OEM Win7 key for a clean install didn't come about until build 10586. Do you know which build is on the USB or when you downloaded it?[\QUOTE]

Thanks WordMan. I hope that is not the problem. I still have the USB stick, so can I tell which build it is by looking at any of the files? I don't think that is the problem however since I just created the USB stick a few days ago.

davidhk said:

Windows 7 product keys are NOT stored in the Bios. the only 'personal' Key is on the COA sticker. In your case, the key is to be found at the bottom of the laptop.

Wow, that is confusing. I was pretty sure that I had the product key, but evidently not.
There isn't a windows sticker on the laptop. I've done a little research and I believe Samsung put the sticker on the power brick (even though they really aren't supposed to do it that way). The original power brick is back in my daughter's dorm room, so we will know tomorrow if this is true. If that's the case, all she has to do is enter that key, right?
~Paul

.............If that's the case, all she has to do is enter that key, right?

Yes. That will be her true Win 7 Home Premium product key.

The way to tell what version of Windows 10 installed is just to run Winver. Just type Winver in search. That doesn't help much, though, if there isn't a Windows 7 product key to enter to activate Windows 10.