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I've seen similar questions but none that directly answer this in cliarty and detail. I have a few windows 8 systems that I purchased stand alone copies of the OS for. I now want to upgrade these with new hardware.

The issue is that I know some hardware changes will make windows de-activate and request a new key. I know this as it happened to my before a month back with a friends PC that I rebuilt. I replaced the motherboard and CPU and RAM and on turning on after detecting new hardware we went into windows with the version number displaying bottom right hand corner of the screen and I knew something was up. Upon going into the system about page it was clear that windows wasn't activated.

Ignoring aside the fact you should ideally reinstall windows if you make such fundamental changes to the hardware I just knew if someone had the definitive word on what Windows is checking and using to determine that you need to reactivate or not?

AdamJones
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It doesn't matter. Re-activating Windows is a snap. You may have to call Microsoft, but just explain that you replaced defective hardware and they will reactivate for you. I've done this more than a dozen times and never had a problem. Unless the same key has requested reactivation a suspiciously large number of times, Microsoft will allow you to activate it again.

To answer your question more directly, the system looks at your hardware configuration when you activate and stores some parameters. These include the serial number of your CPU (if available), the disk drive serial number, the memory size, and so on. If too many of them have changed, Windows requires re-activation.

David Schwartz
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