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

  • @[email protected]
    2•1 day ago

    One note about pulling it from WMI: if you got a free OS upgrade (i.e. from 8 to 10) you may have been issued a new key that’s different from your original OEM key. This might cause some issues when talking with the agent.

    Your luck with phone activation may be different with different agents too, so it might be worth calling back a bit later if you don’t succeed at first.