ok so heres the thing. We all know building new systems at the minute really cant be done for the right price so ive been experimenting with some of these old business machines and making minor upgrades to them for friends.
I picked up an i5 3330 with 8gb ram and a 1tb hdd in a Lenovo flavour on my first go and even though the board was matx I couldn’t transplant it into a nice case due to the irregular set up the Lenovo used with the connector and voltages so I could only use a 1050ti and an ssd to bring it up to date due to no other real options to go further.
Since then a friend I build a pc for out of spare parts I had is really going good and using the shit out of his pc and now wants to get a bit more from his set up. Thing is I built it with an a8 3850 lliano quad core APU on FM1 so I cant do much with it. The rest of the build is sound though. nice case, 500w psu, 270x, 8gb ddr3, ssd and 2x hdd’s.
So fast forward and another ex business machine ive picked up. This one is HP flavour and uses standard atx power connectors, removable io shield, matx board and an i5 3470
This will really get the best out of his set up in my opinion and its a straight swap for the cpu and motherboard. At least physically.
So here are my questions. Can I do the manual driver delete then sysprep thing and just literally swap the parts?
Is there a guide for dummies on how to do this without a fresh install on the forum and not from a no name youtuber I don’t trust?
He has all sorts I cant just replace and if it helps he is on windows 10 and the system I’m using as a donor was on windows 8 so it should already be licensed
You should be able to just plug in the drive into the new system and uninstall any old drivers for like chipset, sata, etc. Might have to call up microsoft and have them verify the key onto the new system
update it worked but both win 10 and office 16 now need new keys.
Manually uninstalled all the drivers and then did the sysprep thing and set it to shut down. all parts swapped over and now my friend is running an hp motherboard, i5 3470 with a push pull 120 aio 2x 500gb hdds and a 120 ssd plus a 270x.
Most of the time this works, but like you experienced your activation is gone.
If you have an OEM license on both products (which you probablly have),
then you have to phone MS and explain them that your system died,
like @Dje4321 mentioned.
If you are lucky they are willing to reactivate it.
Another thing i would highlly recommend, is to do some benchmarks and test runs to see how it performs.
Because from experiances wenn tranfering an existing installation from an old system to a new system,
occasionally makes it perform like ass.
cheers for the advice.
I did the swap. The performance difference was basically obvious to the naked eye. Everything runs smoother etc and I did some game playtesting but did not do any benchmarks, perhaps i should have.
Got a cheap license on ebay. its far more cost effective for me to do that as going through MS customer service as I have experienced before is PITA. Time is money after all
as stated. £10 for a used key from someone that has removed it from an old system and is recycling it is cheaper than dealing with Microsoft for a couple of hours. YES
Select Activate Windows and click on Activate by phone.
Here, select the country/region from drop down menu, and click Next.
Call the toll free number provided.
Follow the instructions from the telephone system and write down the confirmation ID.
Enter the Confirmation ID numbers into fields A through H, in the same sequence as the telephone system provided them. Later, click on Activate.
Note this is for activating windows on a new system, but if you have your microsoft products tied to your account then they are automatically rearmed once you reactive your system.
again. this wouldn’t be an option on an OEM license and the time spent dealing with MS directly is worth more than the price of a recycled unit. at least to me.