Moving Office 2010 licence to W7 from broken m/c

Westlander · 18 Oct 2020

Good evening, I hope everybody is coping safely, in these days. First time user, here, because our Vista machine just broke, and we may have to use a W7 machine as its replacement. We seem to have a couple of choices for getting MS Office onto the W7 system, and I'd like to ask for a couple of clarifications about process, and costs.

Background

When our Vista Pro machine broke, it took down our in-use version of Office 2010 Home and Business. We have a Win7 laptop (i5, 8GB) which has never had its vendor-supplied 'trial' version of MS Office used or activated, and on which we'd like to run MS Office (not Libre Office). I'd prefer to move our licence for Office 2010 to the W7 laptop (which I read is possible and would be cost-free) or, only failing that, license the W7 trial version (hoping to avoid a huge download of today's Office version). The Office 2010 Home & Business licence is for two machines, and a second copy is already activated on a tiny netbook (and we want to retain this). So, the 'move' of the existing Office 2010 licence would be from the broken Vista machine. (And the Vista disk is corrupted by the damage, so I cannot 'uninstall' or 'unactivate' the 2010 install on the broken Vista machine.) Incidentally, in terms of the process, the W7 machine is not internet facing, but we have used Telephone activation for Office 2010 previously (including quite recently when the boot sector was corrupted on the netbook, and Office 2010 wanted to be re-activated after the restore).

Moving the Office 2010 licence from broken Vista m/c to W7 m/c

I understand that moving the Licence to a new machine is permitted. Advice (I think here, in the past) has been that the existing 'trial' system pre-loaded by the laptop vendor should be completely uninstalled. (Am I right to wonder whether this step would seem to be irreversible, should the subsequent install of Office 2010 fail to activate?)

I have my Full Retail DVD, and my product key, for Office 2010 H & B, so I would then install the package It would ask for activation, I would enter my product key. Presumably, Activation will fail at that point because MS's Licensing records would show that my product key was already (apparently) in use on two machines. Comment (elsewhere, I think, possibly from an MVP) suggested that, at that point, one could speak to MS and explain about the machine breakdown, and disk corruption.

Question: I was dismayed to note that Office 2010 reached EOL - merely days ago; does anyone know whether that means Activation has ceased, as well? I don't want to uninstall the W7 trial office version, if I cannot reactivate my Office 2010 licence.

Licensing/Activating the vendor's Office Trial version

The W7 laptop was sold with a trial version of MS Office 2016 installed. As far as I recall, none of the Office programs have been run - though I can't rule out that they may have done so, unintentionally, via the 'clicking on an xlsx file' feature.

Questions:

Q2 Does anyone recall the procedure for Licensing pre-installed MS Office 2016? Presumably, a product key is needed, and then the key is entered when the Activation dialogue comes up? Do we have to have a Microsoft Account, as well? Alternatively, can the Activation procedure obtain a key itself, perhaps via a website where a card purchase will be verified and taken 'in process', so to speak?

Q3 Is it still possible, does anyone know, to purchase an Office 2016 product key that would be accepted in W7? Or know how much that might cost?

Q4 This next is my biggest fear: Will purchasing and entering an Office 2016 key then result in the activated 2016 trial version (helpfully) deciding to update itself to whatever it thinks is the 'latest version', but might actually be a version that only runs on W10? (We do not have any plans to acquire any W10 systems for the time being.) The W7 machine has auto-updates switched off; it also has not had the 'recommend W10' or 'force install W10' updates, either. W7 is SP1, and activated.

May I thank everyone who has taken the time to read this? I am sorry the post has been a little wordy - the options seemed to us to have potential subtle pitfalls so we thought we'd better ask folks who know :)

I'm very grateful,

Westie

SIW2 · 18 Oct 2020

Advice (I think here, in the past) has been that the existing 'trial' system pre-loaded by the laptop vendor should be completely uninstalled. (Am I right to wonder whether this step would seem to be irreversible, should the subsequent install of Office 2010 fail to activate?)

I don't use Office 2010, so I don't know if the trial has to uninstalled or if you can use your existing key to activate it via phoning MS.

But if you do need to uninstall the trail version of Office 2010:

Make an image of the current system before attempting to uninstall the trial. If necessary, the image can be restored putting you back to exact moment the image was created.

There are many imaging programs out there - most have free versions which will do the basic job. Easiest imaging program to use is Aomei Backupper. They have a free version.

Direct download Aomei Backupper free version

You could get the Aomei Backupper Pro version which is on free giveaway at the moment.

Direct download Aomei Backupper Pro and higher

free license key to Aomei Backupper Pro version is HERE Aomei Backupper Pro giveaway

I was dismayed to note that Office 2010 reached EOL - merely days ago; does anyone know whether that means Activation has ceased, as well?

I expect phone activation for Office 2010 will still work, because MS will still activate Vista by phone, which is along way out of official support.