VM friendly way of installing Windows 7/10/11?

Software & Operating Systems Windows
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So, dear forum reader, I humbly ask to have a sanity check here:

I have some keys of Windows 7/10/11 and some of them are probably of the OEM variety. We also have legit retail copies of MS Office of varying years (the non-365).

The objective is to install Windows (any version really it aint coming online ever, or maybe once to register) in a VM that I could pass it around in perpetuity. I did this once (in a Virtualbox VM IIRC) and I now realize that the hardware ID of my old PC may have been used. I did register it properly online just after the install. Now that I have a new PC and moved in the VM, it now says that my copy is counterfeit. It isn’t but now its seeing a new HWID and its noping out somehow.

My questions:

  • How should I setup Virtual Machine Manager/KVM/QEMU so that I could register it once and pass it around forever?
  • Is there a particular selection of CPU/NIC/SATA disk/etc settings that I can even prepare ahead of time so that when its time to upgrade my current desktop components, I can still have this VM?
  • I intend to just use a fresh copies of the VM totally offline for each Windows specific use case (MS Office and Photoshop, specifically).
  • Am I breaking the novel length ToS with this use case? A rhetorical question, its likely a yes, knowing MS.
  • Should I even do all of this when I could use KMSpico to activate offline when I want, if I want? I could always nuke and repave Win7 since it installs so quickly.

Finally, what is the sane and reasonable way forward? Thank you for your insights!

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Update:

I used an older Windows 7 VM and it seemed to accept my current configuration. I could probably adjust the CPU and memory further to increase performance. The OS itself seemed ok, booted without issue and remained registered. Initially, the Office 2016 I used asked to be reregistered online. With my NIC link state still inactive, it seemed to accept just clicking next and register online even though I am not really online.

So it seemed like a nothing burger. Somehow I am still within a grace period of hardware changes. I can now do MSOffice-specific task again in a VM.

Next step would probably involve watching HDR content but that would probably best be done on a dedicated media machine (probably running 10th gen Intel with SGX?)

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