I’ve always used Removeable Boot Drives and Separate Storage on my PC’s… Being able to have “clean” Versions of Win 10 allows immediate change over should I need it and allows for me to play around without fearing I trashed my main C Drive… and yes… I do daily Backups and Images too. Now we have Windows 11 and I thought I was so smart by getting a TPM Chip for my Asus motherboard when they were still available… and affordable. Little did I know that MS was going to quickly proclaim my i7-7700 @ 3.60Ghz not worthy. So my question is this. Using the same PC hardware, can I take a current copy of one of my Drives, and Update it to Win 11 and still swap
back in my current Windows 10 Drive without the Mother-Ship recognizing I’m using two different Versions of Windows (10 & 11) and somehow claiming I’m not permitted to do so under there all reaching use license? My hope is that somehow there will be a work-around for my antiquated processor so I can utilize Win 11 and still benefit from updates and everything else that MS says we will not have access to.
I would think that it should work because they create a hash or a fingerprint of your hardware configuration that is associated with your license key. So as long as you are using the exact same hardware, then I can’t see why you would run into any issues.
The hardware devices (CPU, GPU, RAM, NIC, SSD/HDD) serial numbers (or sizes, depending) are hashed together into a “device ID”. You can see this on your Windows if you go into the first tab (System) of Settings and go to the bottom option “About” and you’ll see something like this:
Device name PC4010
Processor Intel(R) Core™ i3-4010U CPU @ 1.70GHz 1.70 GHz
Installed RAM 16.0 GB
Device ID 236XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXX423A
Product ID 00330-XXX00-XXX00-XXX71
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
The Device ID is calculated from the installed hardware. The Product ID is calculated from the serial number (which you probably don’t actually have if you’ve done an upgrade.)
In any case, all the licensing requires is that the Activation Server have a valid activation record for the pair of the Device ID and Product ID. There is some magical wiggle room for device changes over time, which MS has never documented because they don’t want people to game their activation system.
Suffice to say, if the records exist, your license will be activated and MS won’t really give much of a care.
Thanks for the clarification, and I was aware of MS matching the ID of my hardware to the License, though not in the detail you provided. I just did not wish to move over to 11 on a spare SSD and give it a test drive, then when I threw in my daily driver 10 SSD, to get a Message that I had broken a unwritten rule that prevented me from returning to 10. As I mentioned, I’m sure there are countless users who hope those of us with decent hardware (for now and the near future that is filling our needs) will have the ability to move to 11 with all the bells and whistles and not be forced to upgrade. Again, thank you!