New
#1
Activation after new hardware upgrades?
I have 4 systems to maintain - all had Win7 Ultimate 64bit, and all upgraded (free) to Win10 Pro successfully. Toward the end of this year, all 4 systems will have new motherboards, CPUs, memory and possibly SSDs.
I understand that major hardware changes will cause a deactivation state in Win10 (although I never had any issues with Win7 and hardware upgrades). It would be nice to just pop the old SSDs into each new system, do a few driver updates and be done...
I have seen references that the Win10 upgrade was ONLY good for the hardware it was installed on and you will have to purchase a copy of Win10 for your new hardware. I have also seen references that all you have to do is call MicroSoft, explain about your new hardware and reactivation should not typically be a problem.
I know I can start from scratch and put the original 7 on all of them and then do the free Win10 upgrade again, but this is tedious and I will likely lose most, if not all, of the third-party software (and games) that I had installed across the systems.
So the question is: has anyone done a major hardware upgrade after a free upgrade to Win10 from a valid Win7 / Win8 and successfully reactivated (assuming you were prompted for a reactivation)?