Jesusfrk611
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If you install Windows 10 over top of 7 or 8.1. Great. You don't have to worry about activation and it does everything for you assuming you never do an OS reinstall or your drive never fails for the life of that PC. I don't like doing OS upgrades and would rather a fresh install. Installing Win 7/8.1 with a fresh install and then upgrading should get you a similarly activated Windows 10 with about as fresh as you can get it and still have it activate. However I tried to do a fresh install on a computer that had already done the upgrade from Windows 7. At first I thought from what I read that MS logged the motherboard info so you could activate without a product key so I went ahead and did a fresh install and tried to activate it but it needed a key. So I pulled the product key I got off the old install with ProduKey. Tried that key and it wouldn't work. Said key is not valid. So Microsoft is just making things much more difficult for us if you ever want or need to do a reinstall. The thing is it's only a free upgrade for a year. So after this year will we even be able to do a Windows 7 install and then do the upgrade to get it activated? I am in the process of testing my theory that a fresh install of 7 upgraded to 10 will work the same. I don't know if they deactivate the Windows 7 key once you install 10 or what...
Anyone have any actual answers on this? I work at a computer repair shop and we've already run into our share of Windows 8 activation problems. I hate having to guess if the computer in question started with 8 or 8.1 because you have to install the correct version for it to activate and upgrade to 8.1 if it's just 8 which is just an excellent waste of time. I miss the days of Windows 7 keys on the side of the computer so you can use a Win 7 SP1 DVD and use the key regardless if the computer came without a service pack.
Anyone have any actual answers on this? I work at a computer repair shop and we've already run into our share of Windows 8 activation problems. I hate having to guess if the computer in question started with 8 or 8.1 because you have to install the correct version for it to activate and upgrade to 8.1 if it's just 8 which is just an excellent waste of time. I miss the days of Windows 7 keys on the side of the computer so you can use a Win 7 SP1 DVD and use the key regardless if the computer came without a service pack.