W10 licence transfer. What happens if I change/upgrade my PC later on?

John Pombrio said:

MS has always been good about reactivating an OEM license ("my motherboard broke and I had to replace it!" works every time). MS simply does not care about a license or two, it is worried about the misuse of their activation protocols by thousands of users by use of a key generator of random valid key numbers or a time exploit and stuff like that.

I kind of miss the pre-WPA days... far less hassle. I guess the infrastructure wasn't there yet for WPA for pre-XP operating systems or they simply didn't care until XP. lol.

With regards to this thread, I have something to add. See my latest reply on here

HOW do I transfer windows (retail license) after upgrading to Windows - Windows 10 Forums

alpha said:

With regards to this thread, I have something to add. See my latest reply on here

HOW do I transfer windows (retail license) after upgrading to Windows - Windows 10 Forums

@alpha

I would edit the badword out in that post. That is not allowed here. Brink is really knowledgeable by the way.

Thanks for highlighting

Mystere said:

The new approach will eventually make things easier for everyone down the road. Once people are using largely original 10 keys, then they can reinstall without having to re-enter keys or have them be stored in the BIOS. It's unfortunate the transition will be painful for some people, but sometimes transitions have to be done so that everything is better down the road.

For the average user perhaps but consider PC tech enthusiasts and gamers who may need to reinsall Windows regularly and on different hardware. I see no way this new system is going to make life easier for them. I far preferred the Windows 8 promotion where they offered the OS at a discounted price and gave you a product key.

I have a strange one! I successfully upgraded from win 8.1 pro to win 10 pro and it activated without a problem. Then I decided to re-install win 8.1 pro on a different drive as I have the installation media. I had no problems activating that with my win 8.1 key. Now I have a dual boot with 10 and 8.1 and both are activated! So, I would say to the OP to go ahead and upgrade cause it seems you can still use win 8.1 if you have the installation media and your win 8.1 key.

John Pombrio said:

I just found out today that MS stores your hardware ID on your MS account. When you log in, your hardware is validated and you are automatically activated. So that is why you could get two valid activations on one machine.

Do you think if I uninstalled win 8.1 from my current machine and installed/activated it on another, I'd be able to upgrade that machine to win 10 too?

John Pombrio said:

I just found out today that MS stores your hardware ID on your MS account. When you log in, your hardware is validated and you are automatically activated. So that is why you could get two valid activations on one machine.

I was able to activate 10 without using a Microsoft Account on a clean install.