My wife and I planned to upgrade a couple of HP desktops we had. Due to a bunch of proprietary HP stuff we ended up buying new motherboards, GPUs, PSUs, and processors. We kept the old RAM sticks we had and the hard drives. With one computer we got everything installed incrementally and is working great so far. With the other computer, I put everything together at once and we had a problem booting up Windows. I ended up reinstalling Windows but now it needs to be activated. I can’t find the original product key to activate Windows and I’m starting to worry I’m gonna need to buy a new Windows key. Do I have any other options here? This is getting really frustrating. To be clear, I’m looking to do this all legally, it’s just really annoying that I already was using Windows and now I can’t.
New parts:
MSI B550 Tomahawk Max Wifi
AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X 8-Core
You’ve basically built a new computer; generally that means a new license. There’s still a few things you could try though:
- Undo your changes and remake them individually with a little bit of time between each change (this is basically what you did on your first PC)
- Try the activation process and let them know it’s the same PC, just with some hardware upgrades. I’ve had success reassigning an OEM key before using the telephone method.
- Buy a new (non-oem) license and register it with your account (I think you can have up to 5 licenses registered this way then you can pretty much arbitrarily revoke and reassign it among your future computers without hassle)
- Run the activator script
MS is generally pretty flexible regarding personal licenses and use. As long as you aren’t trying to run the same license on multiple machines you should be fine. What you can’t do is move the license from the OEM machine to your new custom build and expect the OEM machine to remain licensed.
This is the right answer. OEM keys are tied to the hardware so you technically need a retail key. The HP machines were almost certainly using OEM keys (chalk the first one working up to luck I suppose).
That said, by calling the licensing clearinghouse on the phone I have had them activate stuff that they probably shouldn’t have so it’s worth a shot. But I haven’t had to call them in over 10 years so YMMV. If you call them you’ll need the original OEM key from the sticker or by booting up the old PC and pulling it from WMI.
One note about pulling it from WMI: if you got a free OS upgrade (i.e. from 8 to 10) you may have been issued a new key that’s different from your original OEM key. This might cause some issues when talking with the agent.
Your luck with phone activation may be different with different agents too, so it might be worth calling back a bit later if you don’t succeed at first.
Im not going to be the worlds greatest help, but as far as I am aware windows links your license to you motherboard ID or something. That’s why even with a license the affair is going to be messy. Because they inched claimed the license is already in use and cannot be on the new pc.
I could activate then through a Telefone Call thing. But my licence was linked to my account and it showed in my MS account on their website that I own a licence. Without that I would have had no idea to proceed.
So my first step would be to check if you have had registered your old license in your MS account.
Right. Since Windows 8, licenses have been embedded in the BIOS. When you change the motherboard, it’s essentially a whole new PC, which means a new license.
But if the license is linked to your Microsoft account, you may be able to relink the new PC and apply the license.