motherboard upgrade, installing windows 10 (upgraded from 7 oem)

[ms5555]

My cpu is in desperate need of an upgrade, which also means new mobo. I have seen a few posts on how to link windows to your microsoft account to get it to activate.

http://www.windowscentral.com/how-re-activate-windows-10-after-hardware-change
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3271462/buy-windows-reuse-hard-drive-motherboard.html

With this pc I originally bought windows 7 oem copy and last year did the free upgrade to windows 10. Will the above processes work with my version of windows? I'm planning to reuse everything on my current pc except for the cpu and mobo, but I understand I can't just plug in the harddrive, I'll have to do a clean 10 install and then activate.

 

[Colif]

Yes, if you link your licence to your email address you can move it from one PC to another. It works for OEM or retail, there isn't a very big difference between them anymore.

You can try to put hdd in as is but generally it won't work without errors and its easier and smarter to just clean install
You can download the Windows 10 media creation tool and use it to make a win 10 installer on USB, as you will need the latest version of win 10 to complete the move.

 

[ms5555]

Ok thanks that seems to be the consensus. I know the hard drive won't boot as is. I want to do a ssd anyway so it's not an issue, my windows os is on a fairly old seagate momentus xt that only has 500gb of space so I won't mind replacing that too.