Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Licence Key / Activation question

I used to be a lot more enthusiastic about gaming, and built a pretty high spec PC in 2007 with 64 Bit Vista. However by 2010, apart from the odd foray here and there, I really wasn't into gaming that much. The PC itself has had a new CPU, Graphics card and PSU over its lifetime, and it does everything I want it to do just fine. (the PSU popped last year, and I was certain it would have taken out the motherboard and RAM too but amazingly all was well)

In 2012 I paid for a Windows 8 licence, and when Windows 10 came out I took advantage of the free upgrade.

This week my parents got a new PC as their old one was still running Vista, and they were having some issues. Not only did it run very slowly, but some websites were just refusing to connect. It took a while for the penny to drop that support had stopped and they had never used the upgrade to Windows 7 the PC had come with. With the recent hacking stories, and my Dads habit of clicking on links without a seconds hesitation, this was an accident waiting to happen.

We got them a new W10 PC, and I took the old one away to wipe the HDD and dispose off. However, I was curious to see how it would run with a fresh installation of an OS. It came with a recovery partition for Vista, so I re-installed it and was impressed at how well it ran. I then found my paperwork for my W8 purchase and decided to download an ISO of W8.1 and see how that went. Again, it runs really well and if I decide to sell it, a W8.1 machine is a lot more useful than a Vista one

My question is, my W10 Licence / Activation has its roots in the W8 purchase from 2012. W8 became W8.1 became the various updates of W10, and today I have the Creators update.

By (successfully) using my W8 product key with so far no ill effects, am I risking this? I thought the W8 code would just be rejected, and when it worked, I then started panicking that it would de-authorise my W10? All good so far but any input would be welcome.


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