By Taimur Asad | Here’s everything you need to know about how to find your Windows 10 product key and how activation works on free upgraded versus new retail copies of Windows 10. Whether you availed Microsoft’s free Windows 10 upgrade offer, which by the way is available only till July 29th of 2016, or got a new license for your PC off retail, online, or via subscription-based sources like Microsoft’s own MSDN service and the likes, here’s what you need to know about Windows 10 product keys and the full process involved in activating a machine on Microsoft’s latest desktop OS. Windows 10 free upgrade product key and activation: If you upgraded your PC to Windows 10 from a genuine copy of either Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 7, your license will be tied to the hardware you upgrade on, not your Microsoft account, and you won’t get any new product key either. You can verify this using any third-party product key fetching software like ProduKey or The Ultimate PID Checker. 

They will show you generic product keys like TX9XD-98N7V-6WMQ6-BX7FG-H8Q99 for Windows 10 Home and VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T for Windows 10 Pro edition. So what if you want to clean install Windows 10 on the same machine? Yes you can do that by downloading an ISO file, turning it into a USB drive or DVD media and then running the setup for clean install. During install, when Windows setup asks you for product key, simply skip the step and let it complete the installation. Once Windows 10 clean install is complete, your copy of Windows will activate automatically as soon as you connect to Internet. This is because Microsoft knows you clean installed on the same hardware. You can always check your activation status from either Settings (WinKey+I) > Update & security > Activation: Or from Control Panel > System and Security > System: Now if down the road you decide to change the hardware, you will need to call Microsoft support, inform them about the change to get your copy activated.

The TL;DR version of this is: If you used Windows 10 free upgrade option, you won’t get a unique product key. Your license will be tied to the hardware you upgraded Windows 10 on, not your Microsoft account. Clean installs will activate automatically as long as they are done on the same hardware.Waterfront Homes For Sale Bainbridge Island Wa Windows 10 retail product key and activation:Toilet Tank To Bowl Repair Kit If you bought retail license of Windows 10, or got a product key either from MSDN, DreamSpark, TechNet and the likes, you obviously have a unique product key that you can enter in Windows setup during clean installations. Emo Diet Weight LossIn case you lose this number, you can use third-party softwares like ProduKey (download from here) to find it on an existing installation.

You may also like to check out: You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the web.With Windows 10, Microsoft has streamlined the way you download and create Setup media, which may confuse some who are used to doing things the old way. Here’s the foolproof way to do this correctly with Windows 10. As I wrote back in February in Tools of the Trade: Windows USB/DVD Download Tool, Microsoft has for several years offered a handy tool, the Windows USB/DVD Download Tool, which, along with a Windows Setup disk image in ISO format could be used to create Setup media for Windows 7 and 8. It worked well in its day. The problem with the Windows USB/DVD Download Tool is that it formats USB-based Setup media with something called a MBR (Master Boot Record) partition. This type of disk works fine with BIOS-based PCs, meaning that you can select the USB flash drive using your PC’s boot menu and boot from that disk, initiating Setup.

But these drives cannot boot on newer PCs that use UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware. So the Windows USB/DVD Download Tool, great as it was, needs to be retired from our collective toolboxes. (Unless you need to make DVD-based Setup media, I guess.) For Windows 10, there are two ways to solve this problem. The first and easiest way is to simply use Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool, which you download from the Download Windows 10 web site. (Get the version—32-bit or 64-bit—for the PC on which you will create the media.) In the first step of this wizard, you are asked if you would like to “Upgrade this PC now” or “Create installation media for another PC.” Choose the latter option. In the next phase of this wizard-based application, you select your language, Windows 10 Edition (typically Home or Pro), and then the architecture (32-bit/x86, 64-bit/x64, or both). Here, you select “USB flash drive.” The wizard will tell you how much space it needs—3 GB to 6 GB, depending on the choices you made earlier—and will then prompt you to insert the USB flash drive if you haven’t already.

Then it will download the Setup media and apply it to the USB flash drive. From here, you’re good to go, though depending on your needs, you may need at least two flash drives, one for Windows 10 Home and one for Windows 10 Pro. (I use 8 or 16 GB flash drives and include both 32-bit and 64-bit versions on each. Hey, you never know.) If you would prefer to download the ISO files—which can also be used to install Windows 10 in a virtual machine and can be stored on a PC or network drive for offline use—you can use the Media Creation Tool mentioned above to do so. Just choose “ISO file” instead of “USB flash drive” in the third part of the wizard. As noted, in the old days, we would have used the Windows USB/DVD Download Tool to turn one of these ISOs into a bootable USB-based Setup drive. But now, something new is needed. I’ve found that Rufus works the best, and it’s not that hard to configure correctly, though the interface may seem daunting at first. Here, you only need to make a few changes: