New
#1
Hardware changes and activation
In my experience over many years of monkeying about with pc hardware, I have never had problems activating genuine copies of Windows. Changing cpu's, hdd's ram and graphics cards have never bothered Microsoft. Back in the XP days, I also changed motherboards with OEM software successfully. As far as I can tell, only changing the motherboard would cause problems with modern operating systems. I have changed hdd's for ssd's and vice versa and graphics cards with no problems on W10 upgrades. Today, I received a cpu from Ebay and fitted it into the pc which runs 8.1 and W10 upgrade from W7hp. BIOS recognised it at once, but both copies of Windows required a restart, system and device manager failed to recognise the cpu first time. Activation was not affected in either copy of Windows.