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
Im not going to be the worlds greatest help, but as far as I am aware windows links your license to you motherboard ID or something. That's why even with a license the affair is going to be messy. Because they inched claimed the license is already in use and cannot be on the new pc.
I could activate then through a Telefone Call thing. But my licence was linked to my account and it showed in my MS account on their website that I own a licence. Without that I would have had no idea to proceed.
So my first step would be to check if you have had registered your old license in your MS account.
Right. Since Windows 8, licenses have been embedded in the BIOS. When you change the motherboard, it's essentially a whole new PC, which means a new license.
But if the license is linked to your Microsoft account, you may be able to relink the new PC and apply the license.