I’m planning to replace the existing SSD within my Dell Optiplex pc. When I bought it, it came with an SSD that had a windows installation with pro license activated. Now, when I replace this with a new SSD, how do I transfer the license?
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So some fun facts:
- If you buy enough licenses from Microsoft, instead of giving you a bunch of unique licence keys to keep track of, they will give you a license that you can install on a server, and a special “volume license key” that you use on every machine - then, instead of talking to Microsoft to activate themselves, they connect to your server which ensures that it is only activating as many machines as you have licenses for
- These volume license keys are public knowledge to the point that Microsoft publish them on their site because they are useless unless you have a server to validate the activations
- The server protocol is not complex, has been reverse engineered, and there are open source server implementations that forget the whole “ensure you have the right number of licenses” part
