My Windows 10 Motherboard upgrade nightmare.

[Sleeper0013]

I recently decided to upgrade my motherboard after Upgrading from windows 7 to 10.
I was in need of a motherboard with the Thunderbolt header as i'm am an audio engineer, and for latency issues i plan on purchasing a thunderbolt audio interface from focusrite.

I was using an MSI 990FX-GD80 board and i discover that this board will not support thunderbolt.
how ever the Asus Sabertooth 990fx R2.0 would and they are even making the PCIE thunderbolt card. Figuring that the chip-sets are identical, i thought i would have little problem with the transition. And i was quite surprised when even my Raid 1 worked on the new motherboard with out rebuilding. I Booted right up into the OS to find Windows Deactivated as i had expected. so i went about calling Microsoft to activate my office products which went the way it should have. But when i got to activation of Windows 10 a problem occurred. Apparently they can't do that after calling and the activation key failing i calls tech support and they went through he exact steps i took to another failure. While the Tech support agent did a spectacular job, even though it led to a negative end, The only suggestion was to roll back to windows 7 and re upgrade. YA ROLL BACK DOESN'T WORK, not on any system i have tried it on. I have tried it on 6 different systems all with different hardware and all fail. This left me with no recourse but to nuke a perfectly good system that took me 2 and a half months to configure, regarding the fact that i have moved my user profile and ProgramData files to a secondary hard drive. I am using duo SSDs for my system drive and to save space and increase speed I rewrote the Registry to deal with all operations considering those folders and permissions . This was no easy task to accomplish. So to all who have Upgraded to windows 10 from 7 or 8 be prepared if you intend to Upgrade your motherboard, you will either have to buy a new activation key or rebuild your system OS. Also restore system image didn't work, it just restored the broken activation keys.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

If you took advantage of the free upgrade then this is expected behavior. The free upgrade is permanently tied to the first system to which it is applied and cannot be moved to another, this includes replacing the motherboard. In addition, the upgrade consumes the license from the original OS. You will have to purchase a new license for the new motherboard.

 

[Sleeper0013]

considering that fact that your windows 10 activation is linked to your microsoft acount this should be a thing of the past. Any form of upgrade should be recrded as an acctivation of the currrent os in your products list. there for lisence should be transferable to new hardware. What ever microsoft want to do, this is going to sway PC gamers from upgrading especialy if they intend to upgraed in the future. Having to down grade or reload your system after months of tweekign and configuring will in all effect designate windows 7 as the new XP and thus create the very conditions that of endlessly extended suport that microsoft is currently trying to do away with. But as you pointed out this is the way it is and its probably a good thing for gamers with currently upgraded system to know about.

 

[jimmysmitty]

considering that fact that your windows 10 activation is linked to your microsoft acount this should be a thing of the past. Any form of upgrade should be recrded as an acctivation of the currrent os in your products list. there for lisence should be transferable to new hardware. What ever microsoft want to do, this is going to sway PC gamers from upgrading especialy if they intend to upgraed in the future. Having to down grade or reload your system after months of tweekign and configuring will in all effect designate windows 7 as the new XP and thus create the very conditions that of endlessly extended suport that microsoft is currently trying to do away with. But as you pointed out this is the way it is and its probably a good thing for gamers with currently upgraded system to know about.

That is not why XP lasted so long. XP lasted because at the time Vista came out most businesses were just moving to XP and consumers stayed with XP because OEMs put Vista on low end machines and it ran like crap on them while running just fine on higher end machines.

7 wont last much longer as people seem to be adopting 10 fast.

As for the licensing, how can you expect Microsoft to give awaya free copy for unlimited use? If you buy a retail copy it becomes tied to your Live account and can be used on any machine so long as it is on only one. But OEM, which is what most people have, has always been (since XP) one machine only per the EULA.