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
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
Also links to Windows LTSC (Long-term Service Channel) images
This is probably your best option at this point, as long as you’re okay with it ethically. It’s just one command to run.
If you haven’t fully move into your new installation, may I suggest installing the IOT version of Windows 11 instead? It has all the features you’d need and none of the cruft the normal consumer version has.
IIRC the IOT version is 24H2, which i have heard can cause issues with gaming (mainly Ubisoft games i think?).
I hadn’t heard that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I haven’t had any issues with games on my IOT install, but none of them have been Ubisoft.