Windows 7 hardware upgrade question

B

budec

Gawd
Joined
Jul 10, 2002
Messages
748
I'm running Windows 7 Pro (64-bit) at the moment. I want to upgrade my motherboard, CPU and memory. I heard that Win 7 will "un activate" it's self if you have a lot of hardware chances and won't be able to re-enable it? Is that true?
 
Yes, I would expect those hardware changes to trigger an activation request. You should really do a clean install anyway when changing major hardware like your motherboard. Thats the basic foundation for your system and if the chip-sets are different you will likely end up with driver conflicts and all kinds of problems down the road.
 
The license states that you can have Windows 7 installed on one machine. I think you're mixing up two events--the first machine being deactivated, and the second machine being activated.

If you reinstall the OS on a new motherboard, with or without a format, you will need to reactivate it for the new hardware. If you're changing motherboards, you WILL want to format and reinstall, as stated above.
 
You can get into that OEM versus Retail stuff too. I believe an OEM version is tied to the hardware its activated on and can't be moved to another PC. I think swapping motherboards could be considered as moving to a new PC. A Retail version can be moved from one PC to another but not activated on more than one PC at a time. Regardless of which version you have I'd bet it won't activate on line and you will be prompted to call Microsoft to get it activated.
 
I have a retail Ultimate key, I just switched from an Opteron 175 to a Core 2 Duo E8400 and 32bit to 64Bit, fresh install, it activated just fine.

Good luck.
 
If you have a retail license, you are fine. If you have an OEM licenses, technically you are violating the EULA. It's as simple as that. Take that as you will.
 
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