Windows 10: Clean Win 10 Install on Win 7 PC Activated, with No Previous Upgrade

My brother has an older Dell Latitude E6400 laptop that came with Windows 7 Pro. It had not been upgraded to Windows 10.

He bought a new SSD drive for the laptop. I thought I would try an experiment and see if a clean install of Windows 10 on the new SSD drive would activate with the Windows 7 Pro product key that is printed on a sticker under the laptop battery.

I removed the old spinning hard drive and installed the new bare SSD drive, making sure the bios is set to ACHI. The laptop is older and does not support UEFI, so it will have an MBR partitioning scheme.

I created a bootable Windows 10 x64 USB flash drive using Rufus from a downloaded ISO (version 1511).

The ISO I used asks if you want to install Home or Pro, I chose PRO. When the Windows 10 installer asked for a product key, I checked the "I don't have a product key" option. I decided to enter the Windows 7 Pro product key after Windows 10 was installed. The install proceeded normally to completion, asking for a Microsoft Account, which I provided.

After Windows 10 was installed, I opened the Settings, Updates & Security, Activation settings. It stated the PC was not activated because it had no digital entitlement. I selected "change product key" and entered the Windows 7 Pro product key printed on a label under the laptops battery. Windows 10 Pro activated right away.

So, now that Windows 7 product keys are accepted for Windows 10 activation, it appears you do not have to preform an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 first. Saves a lot of trouble and time.

:)

 

Licence Key problem

Did you upgrade win 7 to win 10 or clean install win 10? Win 10 is an upgrade. If you did not upgrade you will have to re-install the previous OS then upgrade or purchase a win 10 key. You cannot use a key to activate the released version of win 10

 

Windows 10 upgrade

I recently upgraded my Win 7 pc to Win 10. But it isn't up to running win 10! if I upgrade or replace my pc, can I just install a clean copy of win 10 and use the win 7 activation key to install the new os?

 

This has been known to most Windows users for quite a while.

Here is one article published on October 15th, 2015 pertaining to the same topic.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/win...ey-to-activate