In a few days, following a motherboard failure, I will be rebuilding my PC with a new motherboard, RAM and CPU. Are Microsoft likely to look favourably on my being allowed to continue to use my W10 digital license? W7 license, before upgrade, was OEM.
It will more than likely fail automatic activation, but I've re-activated OEM releases using the telephone service - dead easy with a smart phone now too.
I swapped out my Mobo a few weeks ago, which caused the system to fail automatic activation, all I had to do was enter the email/password assigned to MS and it activated over the internet without any issues.
I dunno, I just swapped mobo, cpu, and ram, and added 4 HDDs, plugged it all in and not a peep from Win10, so go figure...
I think it depends on your key. Retail keys allow you to use more than one PC per key. If you only have one then all you would need to do in theory is activate it on the new gear which would then disable your old one. I usually use the phone method. But yeah, no key will "die" or what not because you switched hardware. Well, not unless some one else has the same key as you. AFAIK keys from Dell Alienware HP etc are all single use keys. Retail keys allow you to activate on more than one PC
Seems hopefull but, if all else fails, hello Ubuntu. Can't go spending money on a new Windows license at the moment.
You should be fine, just do the phone thang. Recently I crumbled and bought a 8.1 key from a mate who had bought it from a key site. I wanted my rigs as genuine as possible so I bought the key for a tenner. It refused to go on at first, saying it was in use so I did the phone thing and it's been running 10 ever since. That was oo, about four to five months ago? Only major risk with those sorts of serials is the seller gets greedy and sells them multiple times. My Alienware 8.1 key became a 10 key after using it for a certain amount of time (can't go back now apparently) and I've had no issues with that either and can now just straight install 10 on that one.
Rebuilt PC yesterday and tried to activate in the evening. No Microsoft phone service that late so had to do chat but, after much faffing, they gave me a new code and so all is well and activated.