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.
You dont need to activate windows. You just wont be able to change some appearances but thats it. It will update and work just fine.
