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Windows 10 activated on image on different spec PC?
I hope the activation experts here can shed some light on something I inadvertantly experienced over the weekend.
I have two systems; a Win 10 Pro laptop (which I believe has the product key embedded into the UEFI bios - confirmed by Powershell command?) and a standard desktop PC (Powershell returns error).
The two systems are in no way identical - laptop having SSD and desktop haing mechanical HDD for example; not to mention motherboards and NIC.
After imaging the laptop and restoring the image to the PC for testing, I would not usually install the network card driver, but for some reason I did on this ocassion. Unbeknownst to me, I had the cable plugged in whilst booting up from the restored image on the desktop PC (not something I would usually do anyway), but to my surprise, Windows activated!
This is an image with a currently in-use product key (on the laptop) but on completely different hardware - why would it activate? Is it because of the image?
Usually, when I restore an image to a completely different system, it says 'connect to internet to get activated' (or similar) as it detects a significant hardware change (that's my understanding).
Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have affected the validity of the license on the laptop!
I could connect the desktop PC (with a fresh image) to see if it would actiavate again, but as you can appreciate, I don't want to jeopardise the original license.