Question OEM license transfer?

[Sukhoikip]

MY family will soon be replacing the aging living room PC (an HP Pavilion slimline with an Athlon X2 250 and nForce 430 graphics). They've brought up the potential route of buying an optiplex or similar such desktop from goodwill or a government auction, so it won't come with windows. If they were to just drop the hard drive from the existing system into a new one, would they need to buy a new windows license, or would they have a fully working system?

 

[DSzymborski]

They would need a new Windows license.

And just dropping in a hard drive from an old system is not the proper way to install things even if they didn't need a new license. Hard drive installs are not modular in this manner unless you're using a very specific Windows variant. In any case, the proper step is to format a hard drive and do a fresh install with the new hardware.

 

[Wolfshadw]

If you're looking at used Dell desktops, I'd probably recommend looking at Dell's Outlet Page. These are refurbished and running Windows 10.

-Wolf sends

 

[cryoburner]

How old and what capacity is the hard drive, and how much is being stored on it? At this point, I wouldn't bother with running Windows off of what is probably a rather old and slow hard drive. Even if you decide to keep the hard drive as a secondary drive for bulk file storage (video, or whatever), it's probably worth installing at least Windows and your applications to a much faster SSD boot drive. SSDs still cost a lot more per-GB than a hard drive, but at lower capacities they are quite inexpensive now.

 

[Colif]

You going to run into problems trying to install win 10 on a motherboard based on Nforce as Nvidia no longer support the chipset and as such, the Win 10 USB may not even recognise the hardware and fail to install

it would work fine if you updated from 7 to 10, but a clean install wouldn't work.