(September 6, 2015 at 9:19 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(September 6, 2015 at 5:00 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: BTW, discovered that once you perform an upgrade on a particular machine, you are from that point on able to do a fresh install on that same hardware without the need for a product key.
how does that work?
Well, when you activate a product key, it's tied to a "fingerprint" of your installed hardware at Microsoft (AFAIK this has been done since XP). Apparently when activation occurs on the new install, it finds the product key based on that stored fingerprint.