New
#1
Now this is great news. With luck it should help people transfer to the new OS with less issues.
Big change coming to Windows 10's activation system
Windows 10 comes as a free upgrade for those on Windows 7 and 8.1, and in order to get a copy of the new operating system activated, users need to first perform the direct upgrade and wait for it to be automatically validated by Microsoft servers.
Once this happens, Windows 10 adopters can easily perform a clean install because the product key is bound to the used Microsoft account and existing hardware configuration.
But it's not a secret that, for many, this new system failed to work correct and lots of Windows 10 upgraders actually had to wait several days to get their copy of the OS activated either because Microsoft's servers were overwhelmed due to the number of computers attempting to connect or because the fact that something went wrong on users' PCs.
Windows 10 preview for the win
Microsoft has been experimenting with Windows 10 Insider Preview builds a new system that makes the activation process a lot simpler, as it allows product keys that came with Windows 7 or 8.1 to be used for the new operating system....
Read more: Microsoft to Allow Windows 10 Activation with Windows 7/8.1 Keys Starting November - Softpedia
Now this is great news. With luck it should help people transfer to the new OS with less issues.
That is good news, I wish this would have been in place when I tried my clean install in August. It would have saved me a lot of grief.
A nice change to see
But how does the average user know what there product key is?
Say for example I re install 10 and it fails to activate, I have no key sticker on my laptop, what do I do?
(I know there are utilities to show it, but how obvious is this for the average user)
@paulsalter and bromanbro,
PCs sold with windows 8 will have the prod id in the bios/motherboard, so win 8 and win 10 will find and use this.
Win 7 has a sticker and you'll need to enter this in win 10 clean install (when the new version comes out).
If you've already upgraded from win 7 and activated win 10 then, in theory, you can do a clean install as Microsoft now has your pc details on file.
Hope that helps.
Upgraded about a week or so ago. No problems at all with activation. Have been wanting to do a clean install but may wait a bit now to take advantage of this.
Hopefully this can stop the problem I had. Flashing to a new BIOS version and a new graphic card un-activated my Windows 10 Pro, and it could not reactivate, allmost like this guy at Guru3D:
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/mot...-inactive.html
I'm not an insider anymore, so I'll have to wait to let MS make this working for ordinary users (I have an old Windows 8 Pro CD-key)