3164

Remember how back on XP/W7 you could easily set the colour for every element in the UI.
Wonder why they got rid of that.

3165

Welp, I fucked up. Attempting to maximize laziness I moved my old boot drive to the new system… and found out I was using an upgraded volume license from college. Now Windows refuses to activate. My question – the rep I spoke to said the volume licenses were a special version of Pro and I’d have to do a full reinstall once I get a key. Is that true or can I plug in any old Win 10 Pro key and be fine?

3166

You’ll need a valid key anyway, right? So buy one and see if it works. It’s only $22. If not, you can reinstall Win10 on top of itself, tell it to skip the key during the install, then activate once you’re up and running.

3167

Yea, might as well. I’ve got an extra Home key so was hoping to avoid that (in part because I ended up on some other listing where the keys were twice as much).

3168

If you have an extra key, why would you buy another one? Just plug it in and see if it works.

3169

It’s not a key so much as “the system came with Home installed, so if I have to start from scratch I’ll just use that drive”. The plan was to throw the new, Home drive in my old system for a friend.

3170

The windows 10 “digital entitlement” is tied to the specific computer when you upgrade it from an earlier version of windows or activate Win10 on that computer with a win 7/8/8.1 key. There is no way to transfer that specific digital license to another computer.

If you have a windows 7/8/8.1 key for your old computer, you can use that to activate windows 10 on your new computer. If you don’t have a key you’ll need to pay the $22 for your new computer.

Your old system should still be fully activated-- install Win10 and skip inputting the key during the install, boot it up with no key at all, connect to the internet, and it should show as activated.

3171

Are the Win 10 activation servers down? I haven’t been able to verify my Win 10 install since I tried late yesterday evening.

3172

That’s weird. There’s no cryptic error code?

Give phone activation a shot. I don’t know if it works with win 7/8/8.1 keys, but it’s worth trying.

3173

To answer my original question: An upgraded volume license transferred to a new system can be activated with a Pro key. So the rep I spoke to was not only a jerk but also full of shit.

3174

I called and got it working, I just had to re-enter my Windows 8 key, and magically Windows 10 activated. It makes no sense, why did my old Windows 10 key that I had been using for over a year, not work?

3175

Maybe they disabled the “free” keys they gave out last year during the assimilation drive; but kept the “get everyone off working Win7/8 systems and into Prism”-key translation in place.

I’ve had good experiences with MS support in the past with regards to Windows activation, mind you, its been a few years (and probably a few outsourced support companies across the globe).

3176

As far as I know, they never gave out free keys. If you were a beta tester and remained in the “insider” program, they would provide a digital license. Same deal with upgrades from earlier versions of windows, that was a digital license too. But a digital license isn’t actually a key-- it only works on that specific computer.

Lordkosc, you said you had a win10 digital license, not a key. Like I’ve been saying, that is not transferable. You had a real key for win8, and that is.

3177

Correct, only a Win 8 key, and that is the key that Win 10 also now accepts.

3178

Right, you just needed to activate win10 with that key.

3179

Hmm. New build had two complete instant shutdowns yesterday. Not necessarily Windows’ fault. I wasn’t doing anything very demanding, Skyrim mods and video I think. Maybe GPU related. I did see this a few weeks ago, again with Skyrim. I’d expect app crashes rather than system restarts :/

3181

Is there a way to get single files out of old backups?

I have old backups from when I switched SSD main drives a few months ago. But the files I had on my desktop from Windows 7 were stored in the “OldWindows” directory. And slowly over time, Windows 10 erased all the files in the “OldWindows” directory, including all my notes and excel files that I used to keep on my old Windows 7 desktop.

Is there a way to access the old Windows backup I have on another drive, and pick and choose those files and pluck them out? I don’t want to actually roll back to that backup, I just need a few files from it.

3182

What format are the backups? Windows .vhd files? If so, you can mount them in Disk management:

3183

This works great, but do not click the Read only check box, it won’t work if you do.

3184

Cool. Thanks, I’ll take a look tonight when I get home. Now I’m hoping they are vhd images.