The free Windows 10 license you receive is tied to your PC’s hardware. You’re still allowed to use Windows 10 on that same PC even after changing its hardware, but that may not be clear. Microsoft won’t give you a product key.
Microsoft really doesn’t want to explain how the activation process works. It doesn’t want to give pirates too much information, but that does make the licensing process confusing for legitimate users, too.
How Windows Licences and Activation Usually Work
The free Windows 10 license works very differently from previous Windows licensing systems. These all required a product key. Even modern Windows 8 and 8.1 PCs — and new PCs that come with Windows 10 — have a Windows product key embedded in their UEFI firmware. If you buy a new copy of Windows 10 — for example, to install it on a PC you’re building yourself — you’ll also have a product key.
In this case, the product key would always serve to activate Windows. But Microsoft hasn’t been handing out Windows 10 product keys to upgraders. There’s no way to find your Windows 10 product key if you’ve upgraded for free — you just don’t have one.
How the Free Windows 10 License Works
The free Windows 10 license Microsoft is providing to upgraders works differently. Microsoft won’t issue you a Windows 10 product key. Instead, when you perform an upgrade from within Windows 7 Service Pack 1 or Windows 8.1, the upgrade process registers a unique ID associated with your PC’s hardware on Microsoft’s Windows activation servers.
In the future, whenever you install Windows 10 on that same PC, it will automatically
report to Microsoft’s activation servers. Microsoft will confirm that the PC with that specific hardware configuration is allowed to use Windows 10, and it’ll automatically be activated.
This isn’t actually made clear in the installation process itself. To clean-install Windows 10 on a machine activated in this way, you have to continually skip all the product key prompts while installing it.
This automatic process only works if your PC has the same hardware it had when you upgraded to Windows 10.
What if You Change Your PC’s Hardware?
Microsoft has never actually wanted to explain exactly how the hardware-based Windows activation process works. Justreplacing your hard drive or upgrading your graphics card shouldn’t cause a problem. If you’ve just changed a few peripherals, Windows 10 may just automatically activate itself after you clean-install it.
However, replacing your computer’s motherboard or CPU will likely be so big a change that it prevents the PC from automatically activating. Windows 10 will see it as a different hardware configuration, one which isn’t allowed to have the free upgrade.
If you run into this problem, you should just be able to clean-install Windows 10 normally. Skip both prompts when you’re asked to enter a product key. After it installs, it will attempt to activate itself with Microsoft and won’t automatically activate. It will be considered non-genuine until you activate it. The activation screen will prompt you to purchase a new license from the Windows Store.
According to Gabriel Aul, Vice President of Engineering for the Windows & Devices group at Microsoft, you can then contact support from within Windows 10, explain the situation, and they’ll activate Windows 10 for you:
To do this, you should be able to open the Start menu, select All Apps, and launch the Contact Support app included with Windows 10. Navigate to the Services & apps > Windows > Setting up category, which includes activation issues. You can text-chat with a Microsoft support representative here or have a Microsoft representative call you on the phone.
The free Windows 10 license isn’t tied to a Microsoft account at all — it’s just tied to the PC’s hardware configuration. However, we assume that it might help if you sign into the PC with the same Microsoft account you signed in with on your old PC. That would give Microsoft Support some way to confirm you previously had a free Windows 10 license on that PC. That’s just a guess, of course — Microsoft isn’t saying exactly what is required here.
You Can’t Move a Free Windows 10 License to Another PC
Bear in mind that this will only work on the same PC. This does create some an inconvenient situation for people who boughta full retail license — not an OEM license — of Windows 7, 8, or 8.1. Most people don’t do this, though — even people building their own PCs usually seem to buy OEM copies of Windows.
Those retail licenses are portable between different PCs, so you can take them with you from PC to PC. You might have purchased a Windows 7 license and built your own PC. Build a new PC a few years later and you can take that Windows 7 license with you as long as you remove it from the first machine. Rinse and repeat over and over — as long as you’d like to continue using Windows 7.
However, that free Windows 10 license you get as part of the upgrade process is tied to an individual PC. Even if you upgraded from a retail copy of Windows 7, 8, or 8.1, you won’t be given a retail copy of Windows 10. You just can’t move that free Windows 10 license to another PC. After the first year is up and the free Windows 10 upgrade offer is over, you’ll have to buy a new copy of Windows 10 if you want to move it to an entirely different PC.
This may feel a bit inconvenient. But, on the other hand, that Windows 10 license was just a free bonus in the first place. Retail licenses of Windows 10 you purchase can be moved between PCs in the same way.
Microsoft’s solution here is to hand this responsibility off to its support department, who can activate Windows for you. There’s no automatic process and no product key to help you. It’s a bit like calling Microsoft on the phone to activate previous editions of Windows — but at least you had a product key to help you in that scenario. Hopefully Microsoft’s support people are trained well enough to handle this properly.
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