Win 10 and MB change.

[GoKs]

Good day. Me again.

I had an oopsie with my MB and it is not working anymore, I had Win10 installed on my HDD. Now the question is, if I replace my broken MB with the same make and model will my Win10 still work, or do I have to buy a new license?

Thank you.

[Blackmist]

If it was a Retail version of Windows then it should be OK, even if you do have to reinstall.

I upgraded recently to a new Skylake, dropped the old drive in and it mostly went fine. Had some trouble with sleep mode not working, but a few BIOS tweaks and swapping the monitors over (no idea why that made a difference) and that works too. People will tell you it's a terrible idea, and it probably is, but it does mostly cope with it. It said it wasn't activated, but a click of a button and it reactivated fine.

If it was an OEM version, you might have licensing issues. You'll probably have to ring them up and tell them your motherboard broke and you had to replace it. They'll mostly just reactivate it for you.

[GoKs]

If it was a Retail version of Windows then it should be OK, even if you do have to reinstall.

I upgraded recently to a new Skylake, dropped the old drive in and it mostly went fine. Had some trouble with sleep mode not working, but a few BIOS tweaks and swapping the monitors over (no idea why that made a difference) and that works too. People will tell you it's a terrible idea, and it probably is, but it does mostly cope with it. It said it wasn't activated, but a click of a button and it reactivated fine.

If it was an OEM version, you might have licensing issues. You'll probably have to ring them up and tell them your motherboard broke and you had to replace it. They'll mostly just reactivate it for you.

Thanks for the reply.

So I might just aswell buy another make/model MB since it will still need to activate on the same make and model..... thought I could skip the hassle.

[Blackmist]

Fairly sure it activates on the serial no rather than make and model. Otherwise you could buy 10 identical machines and clone the drive. You'll probably have to ring them and explain, anecdotal evidence online suggests that would be enough.

[Kyocere]

I upgraded Mobo, CPU and RAM to the new Skylake and it automatically activated within a few minutes of booting up. I did however not do a clean install, choosing to go in and remove all old drivers and things. Totally not the correct way to do it, but it worked fine. I have an OEM key btw.

[Lathais]

I upgraded Mobo, CPU and RAM to the new Skylake and it automatically activated within a few minutes of booting up. I did however not do a clean install, choosing to go in and remove all old drivers and things. Totally not the correct way to do it, but it worked fine. I have an OEM key btw.

Most of the time, this will actually work just fine. However, when stuff goes wrong, it tends to go really wrong, and that is why many of us generally recommend a clean install.