Windows 7: Activate Win 7 Moved From Dead Computer?

A customer of mine had an Acer computer that died with a bad motherboard. It had a Windows 7 Professional license under Prod Part# X15-39685, Prod Key: xxxxx-xxx-xxxxxx-85817. We don’t know whether this was a full (transportable to another computer) or OEM license. Meanwhile, to get the customer “up and running” as quickly as possible with all of his installed applications intact, I backed up the original hard drive (using a workbench PC) and restored it (Acronis Universal Restore) to a new Dell I620 machine. Needless to say, we now get the “Non-Genuine Windows” nags and need to correct the licensing issue on this new machine.

How can I determine whether this is a transportable license and if so, activate it on this new machine? If not, the new Dell came with an OEM Windows 7 Home Premium license and the vendor from which the machine was purchased offers an “anytime” upgrade to Windows 7 Professional (for a about $50), and if that upgrade was purchased, could the license key from that upgrade be used to activate the Windows 7 Pro currently installed. (We are looking for the least expensive solution that will avoid having to re-install all of the customer’s applications.)

Welcome to Windows Seven Forums.

The "Product Key" you have listed is in fact the Product ID, which determines whether you have a retail or OEM version of Windows.

If it is an OEM version your Product ID would read xxxxx-OEM-xxxxxxx-xxxxx.

Please delete the Product ID from your post to avoid complications when somebody "borrows" it to activate a dodgy copy of Windows.

You therefore most likely have a retail version of Windows whose licence can be transferred to another computer providing the software has been removed from the old computer.

Telephone activation should succeed without any difficulty.

This tutorial explains the procedure: Activate Windows 7 by Phone

The owner should know if the Acer came with Windows 7 Professional preinstalled or not. If so, it's factory OEM which activation cannot migrate and needs reinstall or changing to the lesser version to activate with the new OEM Home Premium key.

You might be able to do the latter by first utilizing the workaround to change between versions as long as they are the same bit-rate. The steps are given here: Change versions workaround.

Once HP is activated, use Anytime Upgrade to migrate to Pro providing the few extra expensive features are really needed - there is zero performance difference between these versions. Windows Anytime Upgrade - How to - Windows 7 Forums