Can you move a win10 install to a new computer?

[Lichay]

So I'm planning an upgrade soon which involves changing motherboard (along with other stuff obviously).
Right now i have win10, and i was wondering if there's a way to move my win10 install over to my soon-to-be new computer.

i've got this win10 by upgrading from win7, but the free upgrade is over by now, as far as i heard anyways

EDIT: i won't be using the same hard drive as a boot drive, part of the upgrade is an SSD

 

[Ethanh100]

If you are using the same hard drive or ssd in the new build, just put it in the system and just use that, no need to reinstall or anything. If you are not using the same disk, you can use windows backup to make a system image and back htat up to an external drive, and then you can recover from that backup with windows 7 installation media.

 

[bicycle_repair_man]

If your Windows 7 media was OEM then you'll more than likely need to reactivate the OS. There's also a chance that the activation will fail and you'll have a buy a new copy of Windows.

 

[BadBoyGreek]

If you're going to build a new system with new motherboard etc., I strongly suggest you do it as a clean build. Dropping the hard drive into your new build as recommended above is not a good idea; there's too many variations in drivers from one motherboard to the next and just dropping the drive in as is will likely introduce a lot of problems.

As for your existing drive with all your stuff on it, you could hook it up as a secondary drive on your new system and retrieve your data that way. For reactivating Windows 10, since you're talking about making major hardware changes, you'll likely need to call Microsoft to reissue you a new activation code for Windows. Depending how extensive your hardware changes are, they may or may not make you purchase a new license.