Swapped PC with a friend

[InfamousGeezer]

Me and a friend have swapped PC's.  We now want our original SSDs back which contains our Windows 10 OS.  I have a feeling that the windows 10 license is licensed to the motherboard.  Is this correct?  If so can I troubleshoot this problem by exchanging our license keys with one another?  We both want to reinstall windows 10 once we have our SSDs back.

 

[Supahos]

Tie your accounts to your live account and simply reinstall.

 

[Rocky Bennett]

You will still have to do a clean install on each computer of Windows because of driver incompatibilities.

 

[BadAsAl]

If you have the Anniversary update for Windows 10 the license will be tied to your Microsoft account and not to your hardware.
Here is some more information on this: https://www.howtogeek.com/226510/how-to-use-your-free-windows-10-license-after-changing-your-pc%E2%80%99s-hardware/

It will not matter how you go about doing this, each of you login to the computer you have with your Microsoft Account (MSA) and check if you are using the digital entitlement as described in the linked article. If you don't use an MSA or don't have one, create one and login anyway. Once you swap the drives you can do whatever you want now, just login with your MSA to reactivate then you can keep using MSA to login or disable it and only use a local account.

 

[BadAsAl]

You will still have to do a clean install on each computer of Windows because of driver incompatibilities.

That is a possibility especially going from AMD to Intel or vice versa. Windows 10 seems to be a lot more forgiving in this respect so I usually advise to try it and if it blue screens or has other issues to then do a refresh or fresh install.