Fresh Win 10 Install

[guilly]

To provide an alternative that sums up the general method, I've been finding this really useful for doing a clean install of Win10 if you did the free upgrade.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials...10-directly-without-having-upgrade-first.html

To sum it up, there's an exe called gatherosstate.exe on the windows 10 cd/dvd. You run it, and it backs up your activation state in a Genuineticket.xml file on your desktop. Backup this file

Do a clean install without a key and/or Start the install from within windows, like if you're going to do an upgrade, but choose the option to keep files only. Finish the install and then copy that Genuineticket.xml back into a specific folder outlined in that how to I linked, reboot maybe, and poof, reactivated.

I've done this dozens of times now, it's easy and painless. Just don't expect it to work if you're changing your hardware.

Cool, never heard of this... But is this still necessarry with Win10 ? Seeing as though they basically activate the license based on Serial# of MB ? I thought the whole advantage of the Win10 approach was not to have to deal with the reactivation headache ?

 

[rjbarker]

Thnaks for the answers guys

 

[Bond007]

Thnaks for the answers guys

For info yesterday I bought a used pc with a win 7 pro key that was never upgraded to win 10. I did a clean install of win 10 (by downloading it to USB on another pc). When asked for the key I put the win7 pro key in and once in Windows it activated the copy of win10 pro without issue.

 

[stlouis1]

Cool, never heard of this... But is this still necessarry with Win10 ? Seeing as though they basically activate the license based on Serial# of MB ? I thought the whole advantage of the Win10 approach was not to have to deal with the reactivation headache ?

that method is new in windows 10 to my knowledge. Whether it's necessary I would say no as there are obviously other methods in this thread. I think where this may come useful though is that MS grants a limited number of activations before you have to call in or use the new phone activation app. With this method it doesn't hit the activation servers, but also won't work with drastic hardware changes so you can't just copy the xml file to another different machine and activate it.