Upgrading all the PCs in the house: OS reinstall Confusion
 

Going to be upgrading my gaming rig very soon, and consequently doing a bunch of hardware shuffling in the house.

Long story short:

1. New internals going into my PC
2. My current internals going into mom's computer
3. Mom's computer current internals being repurposed as an HTPC in the family room

Both mine and my mom's computer have retail copies of Win7 Ultimate installed. My question is, given that the internals from my mom's computer (cpu, mobo, HDD) are simply being repurposed, nothing that would require an OS to be reactivated is changing, I probably wouldn't have to reactivate right?

Therefore, because I have a new SSD with my new internals, I plan to do a clean install of Win7 Ultimate which would require reactivation. Also, because I'm giving my mom my current SSD and doing a clean install of Win7 Ultimate, that would require reactivation as well.

Am I right in saying that even though nothing is changing hardware-wise with the current internals from my mom's computer being repurposed as an HTPC, I will either:

• Not be able to activate Windows on my mom's new PC after clean install (if it even allows me to do a clean install with another installation already existing on another hard drive)
• Or not be able to continue using the already-installed Win7 on the repurposed HTPC with internals from mom's current computer

Apologies if this seems extremely confusing or if I'm making it sound more complicated than it should be :derp:

GET A MAC

Good to have the code handy... I changed my ram and CPU and the computer asks me to reactivate Win 7 again.
But when I changed the RAM only on my dads comp, it didn't ask for code.

Depends on what you are shuffling. Unless you are moving the entire sets of hardware (every single thing other than the case) from one shell (case) to another, your OS on the hard drive are not going to recognize the mix-n-match hardware so your shit won't boot. Fresh OS installation and activation will be required on any mix-n-match.

I don't think you'll be able to activate another instance of the same Win 7 CD key on your mum's new setup because it's technically in use by the older parts. However, the old parts & Win 7 should still work.

The general rule of thumb is that if you are installing a new motherboard or a new OS hard drive, you should reinstall Windows since (**I read about this a long time ago so may not be correct**) tied to the model of your mobo and/or hard drive.

Upgrading to a faster CPU or RAM shouldn't trigger a Windows reinstall. I remember upgrading from a AM2 Athlon 5200 dual core to AMD Phenom II X3 720BE processor using the same motherboard (ASUS M2A-VM) and I didn't have to reinstall OS. YMMV.

What i did was call the ms activation hotline to reactivate my os on a new mobo. Tell them its a hardware upgrade or your mobo died. This website should help you out.

Activate Windows 7 by Phone - Windows 7 Help Forums

Windows activation is based on the machine code. The machine code is derived from motherboard ID, hard drive ID, and CPU ID. If any of those IDs change, Windows thinks you have a new system. By the way, retail Windows usually gives you 2 activation; however, legal you can only activate 1 computer.

At work, one of my many tasks is to look after 350+ PCs. I have shuffled many computer components around, and most of the time, they didn't require an OS reinstall. Of course, I went from similar hardware to similar hardware. The only time I needed to reinstall the OS was going from and to dissimilar motherboard chipset.

To be technical, what prevents the OS from booting is the boot manager unable to read the hard drive. The first thing the boot manager will load is the hard drive drivers; IDE, AHCI, or RAID. If those drivers change drastically, the OS won't load and gives you a blue screen or "unable to read boot device" error.

To answer your questions above, take an Acronis Backup version 11 or above of hard drives. Now, restore all of those backups to their new hard drives. During the Acronis restore, there is an option to keep machine ID from the backup image. If you're changing just the hard drive, Windows shouldn't ask you to activate.

Thanks for the responses. I've never had Windows reactivation issues because every time I do major upgrades (CPU/boot drive swap/mobo) I always do a clean OS install.

What I'll probably end up doing is do a clean Win7 install onto mom's computer (new SSD but with my old parts), move everything inside mom's current computer into a small HTPC case of sorts and do a clean Win7 install onto a new SSD, and then I found out a friend of mine has a retail copy of Win8.1 he'll give to me so I can go up to Win10 :megusta:

I have a late 2013 MBPr 15", absolutely love it. Probably going to be getting dad a Mac Mini soon. OS-wise, if you're not doing any gaming, Mac is perfect. I still need my games, therefore I need Windows.

^ I still can't copy and paste :derp:

I just re-built two machines in my house with new hardware, and I didn't have a problem re-activating either of them using the my existing Win 7 serials.

I figured that I would at least have to phone them to explain that I was upgrading the computers.

I think Microsoft just allows a certain number of activations after a period with the expectations that people upgrade hardware.

^^ This. I have re-shuffled hardware pretty much like what you've done here back in the early Vista / Win7 world. When the online activation didn't work out, I just called the MS activation hotline, and they will help you through it. The good thing with Win7 is, you have a 30 day grace period for activation, so that's plenty of time.

I'll find out soon enough. I wonder if Microsoft will still let me install 7 given that they are almost to the point of forcing everyone to update to 10 which I do not want to do yet.

Microsoft will let you install any of their products any time. It's a different story if you want support from Microsoft. It's a different story if you want to install newer software on older OS.