How does it go with upgrading Win 10 machine motherboards?

OK I have a question. I have a bunch of Win10 machines, six of them at the mo...

Now what I want to do is put a new motherboard/CPU in my best machine, but I'll keep the harddrives and everything intact. I'll probably transfer C: to a new drive and re-arrange what's on what physical drive, but anyway I'll keep the same enclosure, power, drives, display card (for now), accessories and so on.

The old motherboard/CPU goes into the 2nd.machine and also in that one I want to keep the harddrives and everything intact; there's like a gazillion games installed on that one I don't want to erase.

The mobo/CPU from the second machine will not be used any more, thrown in the bin.

How am I going to do with the Win10 licences? Do I need a new licence for the new motherboard, even though there is one machine taken out of use? Is it in any way possible to upgrade the motherboard without getting a new W10 licence? This is something I like to do at least yearly, ie. swap mobos around and get a new one for one machine, throw the oldest one in the bin. It used to be OK with W7; I'd just go to the device manager, delete all, shut off, swap the mobo, reboot, done. Pretty much.

Any ideas what's the best approach with W10?

You are quite right that a new motherboard will not reactivate and W10 considers it a new machine. My first approach would be to call Microsoft and explain what you have done and they should provide you with an activation key for the new motherboard. You can't legally have more machines activated than the number of W7 installations you originally purchased. If you have a spare W7 product key then you could activate a new W10 installation with that.

Yes, it seems like a very confusing issue. I do believe most of my licenses are OEM and those seem pretty clearly to be non-transferrable.
I'm pretty sure though some of my licenses are full licenses (if you updated from OEM it stays OEM, but a full stays full)...

It really is kind of a mess with these. I have bought every MS OS except Vista since DOS 6.11...one of my machines has been updated right from XP thru 7 and 8, 8,.1 to now 10 and I have no idea what kind of a license it has any more.

Also, since both my licenses on these machines are now PRO; if I swap the mobo and reinstall HOME versions over them because it's cheaper I wonder if they will actually work just like that. I mean, if I have a Pro installation with a new motherboard, will it let me replace it with a new HOME license?

I wish it were a bit more simple. Does it actually show in Windows properties if it's an OEM license or full somewhere?

You might find the following tutorial useful:

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/7...dows-10-a.html

The route to customer support for activation is also given in the article along with other links to useful information on activation.

Awesome, thanks a lot!!!

Hm, very interesting indeed. Here's what my machines say:

Machine1:
Original Edition: Windows 7 Professional OEM:NONS
OEM Key: OEM key not present in firmware

- Does that mean, since it's not in firmware, that I can nevertheless swap the motherboard despite it was OEM originally???

Machine 2:
Original Edition: Win 8.1 RTM Professional Retail
OEM Key: Windows Vista OEM marker present in firmware

??? This says it is retail, which means I can swap the mobo? Despite there being Vista marker (probably some previous owner had it).

FWIW, I figure what I need to do is move the HD along with the mobo to system 2 and keep that installation, just clean it up or even reinstall without keeping documents and settings. That way there will be no issues with licenses.

Then I will build a new machine but use the originally win 8.1 key to install w10; since that was a retail version it should accept the key as long as the machine/mobo it was taken from isn't in use any more - which it isn't.

Only means that I need to reinstall everything on both machines. Oh well. Maybe for the best.

deeaa said:

FWIW, I figure what I need to do is move the HD along with the mobo to system 2 and keep that installation, just clean it up or even reinstall without keeping documents and settings. That way there will be no issues with licenses.

I built a new computer for myself and upgraded my father-in-law's computer with my old motherboard. As long as your Windows 10 says "Windows 10 on this device is activated with a digital entitlement" on the activation screen of settings, updates & security, then the same version of Windows 10 will activate on that same motherboard. His old motherboard had Windows 10 activated on it from a Windows 7 upgrade as did my old motherboard. I didn't want to re-install everything he had so I just moved the motherboard over. His Windows 10 installed the new drivers and just picked up right where it left off and stayed activated because the new to him motherboard already had a digital entitlement.

My new computer got a new install of Windows 7 which I had to activate over the phone because my family pack retail product key has been used so much in the past, grabbed the genuineticket.xml file, then clean installed Windows 10 and activated with the genuineticket.xml file.