I have a retail Windows 7 Home Premium license, which allows for moving between machines. I upgraded it to Windows 8 and 10 through their respective programs and I could upgrade to 11 if it were to support my PC, but it doesn’t.

So I want to move the license to my newer laptop (13th gen Intel Framework 13). I could install Windows 10 with my Windows 7 key and then upgrade to Windows 11, but unfortunately the laptop doesn’t support 10, not even enough to just install. And Windows 11 doesn’t accept my Windows 7 key.

Any ideas? One thing I considered is booting from USB, attach the system storage to a VM, install Windows 10 there, upgrade to 11 and then reboot into it natively, but maybe there’s a better way.

(I’m not intent on buying a new Windows 11 license, I own a license for 10 that can be moved and upgraded)

Fixed!

This is what I had to do, in the end, to transfer the retail license from my Windows 10 PC to a Windows 11 laptop:

  1. Link the Windows 10 license to my Microsoft account. First my Windows 10 activation status showed “activated with a digital license”, switching to a Microsoft account associated the license with that account, making it show “activated with a digital license connected to your Microsoft account”

  2. Install Windows 11 on the laptop. Choose “I don’t have a product key” during installation.

  3. In the Windows 11 activation settings, use the troubleshooter, select the “I changed my hardware” option. It should spin for a bit and then give an option to show devices to transfer the license from. (This first failed for me with a generic error message, fixed by reinstalling Windows 11)

  4. Choose the old system to transfer the license. (My Windows 10 system wasn’t listed the first time, I had to convert its account to local and then back to an MS account for it to show up)

The old Windows 7 key w/Windows 10 upgrade path was a massive red herring, that option was closed in 2023.

  • strlcpy@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
    1·
    1 天前

    Windows 10 doesn’t have drivers for the storage controller in these chipsets built in, so it prompts for one.

    People in the Framework forums dismiss questions about this saying you should just use 11, but I also read now thar Framework’s Windows 11 driver bundle mostly works on 10, too. Now I’m trying to extract the Intel RST driver and load it in setup, but so far it fails to show any compatible devices.

    I’ll try a bit more and report back