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
With OEM computers, the license is only for the hardware it came with.
OEM license keys can not be transferred to new computers.
Even if you get the key installed and activated, you are not legally licensed for that install.
You must have a retail license key to have transfer rights to new systems.
Is that going to cause a problem for the other PC, it seems like everything switched over alright from that, but could my Windows suddenly decide it isn’t activated anymore and give me the same problems?
Probably not. Windows isn’t overly smart about that. If it’s activated it should stay that way.