Confusion over Win 10 activation after motherboard swap

[skeedo]

So MB died in my machine and will need to be replaced. Probably going with a different brand this time. I never created a Microsoft account on the machine, so I'm a bit at a loss as to what's going to happen after MB swap.

On the machine, Win 10 was an upgrade from Win 7 Pro DVD. Someone told me I can just re-enter the Win 7 license key when it asks me to reactivate, but to me this sounds like it'd be too easy and MS never likes to make things easy.

What exactly is going to happen to Win 10 when I swap out MB and how can I retain the existing Win 10 install without having the license saved to MS account?

 

[RLGL]

50 /50
I did a mobo swap , signed in to my account with no activation issues

 

[skeedo]

That's the thing, I don't have an account and never even knew about it...so wondering what kind of issues I'm going to run into.

 

[Dulanic]

It's kind of luck of the draw. I somehow got it to keep my activation switching from a i7 920 to a Ryzen... Not sure how I got that one to work.

 

[Ichinisan]

Helped a friend swap a bad motherboard a few months ago. Installed with no key. At first, there was an activation error of some kind. Microsoft said they couldn’t help.

Friend took the PC home and at some point it suddenly said it was activated successfully.

 

[Oyeve]

I did a mobo swap a couple of years ago, logged into my updated win10 with my MS live PW and it just activated. I think MS uses a combo of live id and mobo for verification. I don't really know.

 

[Malogeek]

What exactly is going to happen to Win 10 when I swap out MB and how can I retain the existing Win 10 install without having the license saved to MS account?

Without being bound to a Microsoft account, it will still be registered with MS and identified by the system unique id. Since you're changing motherboard/cpu, it won't match. If your original Windows 7 was a full/upgrade and not an OEM, it should activate fine. If it was an OEM, then it may not activate and you can try your luck with activating manually.