Windows digital license

[yousnoozeyoulose]

Have got a dusty Athlon 64 system lying around, boots into Win 10 in a few seconds off an SSD, great for playing GTA IV. Perfectly capable machine, but surplus to requirements these days.

It's got a digital license, so that's tied to the mobo, CPU and RAM, I'm guessing?

If I remove the SSD, and hand off the machine to someone that wants it, and they put in their own SSD and use a media creation USB/ISO thingamy to install Windows, does the digital license kick in? i.e. does the license only care about the hardware and couldn't give one jot about the user?

[king1]

generally speaking, yes that is the case. The activation profile that MS creates can tolerate a change of hdd/ssd as long as the same windows version is installed... That extends to a new drive and new windows installation.

Where it will fail an activation is if the mobo is changed on it, but even then you can sometimes work around that by signing in with an MS account to tie the license to your MS account.

The key point for re-installing to a new HDD is
A) install the same windows version - this will need to be chosen during the installation process as windows won't be able to detect it on hardware that old...
B) ignore/skip requests for license license keys when asked... When windows is installed and online it will activate automagically

[yousnoozeyoulose]

Excellent, thanks. Sounds like a goer.

Failing that, I'll just hawk the bits. Dusty GTS 450, anyone? lol