From what I understand, if your digital license is linked to your MS account you can make major hardware changes without Windows nagging about activation.
Yes, that was always the way it was supposed to work, and should that fail the Activation Troubleshooter should fix it....
Was that activated via the free win7>win10>win11 method ?
It is only people with the free upgrade activation that are having strange problems.
The problem seems to occur if windows thinks there has been a hardware change and it was previously activated using the free upgrade.
I know I said I had run out of laptops to test this on, but I got another one today. This test may have clarified some of the questions on 'W7/W8 upgrade digital licences'.
It's actually an old PC, a Samsung R519 from 2009 that originally had OEM Windows 7. It was advertised on eBay as: 'for spares, no HDD or battery'. I wanted it for the screen, it's the same as one of mine that has a damaged screen with a dead (and slowly growing) black patch. Turns out that on testing with a spare SSD that it's fully functional, so now the plan is to swap the HDD, battery, and charger from the old machine to this new one.
Next question was digital licences, had this new machine ever been upgraded from W7 > W10? And if so, was that Home or Pro?. The old PC has a digital licence for Windows 10 Pro. On booting the new one from an SSD with W10 Pro on it, it didn't activate. This is where it gets interesting. Obviously the hardware had changed, but the Activation Troubleshooter reported that this PC had a valid digital licence for Home, So it would appear that any digital licence obtained by upgrading from W7 or W8 is still valid today, they haven't been revoked just because the free upgrade has ended. It's just a pity that this PC's digital licence was only for Home.
The next step was to sign in to the old machine, switch to an MS account to link its digital licence to the MS account, then clone the OS to the new machine, sign in with the MS account in order to transfer the digital licence. This is effectively a hardware upgrade, exactly the sort of thing that the Activation Troubleshooter was designed for. I wanted to run exactly the same system on a new motherboard and would dispose of the old one.
I clicked on 'I recently changed hardware on this device'. This failed. The reason given was that the servers that would transfer a digital licence to the new hardware were not available. This is the activation issue that so many are reporting, and which seems to have been the case since the free W7/W8 upgrades were turned off.
