oem licence on on dead pc

alan60 · 20 Jun 2016

hello guys. new here and good to be a member. as the title suggests my friend has just installed a win7 oem licence on his ageing pc.(did a clean install from xp) problem is the pc has just packed up and is no longer usable. i can build a selfbuild for him but is there any legal way i could transfer the oem licence he has just purchased for this new build? he bought the oem disc off ebay just a couple of months ago so it seems a shame that he needs to buy a brand new licence. any help would be appreciated. thanks

Barman58 · 20 Jun 2016

if the OEM licence was activated on the old hardware it technically "died" with the old hardware, If you are retaining some of the working old hardware then you may be able to call Microsoft and get the Key re-instated.

It's a lot less likely that the same outcome would be applied to a completely new build, but you could give them a call and give it a try,

Microsoft are not always the Money grabbers that they are often painted as so they often help out genuine users with a problem like this, but of course this is not guaranteed

alan60 · 20 Jun 2016

thanks for that mate. to be honest there's nothing i would salvage from his old pc. so i'll go ahead with the new build and give microsoft a call. just unfortunate that he upgraded when he did, if he could have waited a few more weeks then the old pc would have clapped out before he installed the win7 licence key. cheers

Barman58 · 20 Jun 2016

All I can suggest is to just be honest to the Microsoft contact and say what happened and hopefully you'll get the OK.

Of course you may find that the normal entry of the Key will work during install when first installing stranger things have happened

the other thing is that the first time you call MS you will normal get presented with the robot check which may also OK the install as the key is new and the old PC will be "missing"

alan60 · 20 Jun 2016

nice one. i'll let you know how it goes.