Not being asked to activate W10

[bainbridge]

Hi, I recently formatted my partner's Lenovo laptop and installed a copy of W10 home which I'd downloaded to usb from the ms site. The machine was on W8 before. W10 works fine, I was expecting to be asked to enter my W10 product key, which I recently purchased to use on this machine, but I've got no prompts or anything. I've gone into the activation part of settings, expecting there to be an activation tab, but nothing is there.

What am I missing? Have I bought a W10 key when I didn't need it? What the Dickens is going on? Ms normally has no qualms about telling the user they need to activate.

I've been on w7 for 10 years so please forgive my ignorance.

Thanks

 

[bainbridge]

win 8.1 keys are valid for a win 10 upgrade. It'll be hardware recognised or linked to your partners MS account if she did that.

https://www.howtogeek.com/266072/yo...ws-10-for-free-with-a-windows-7-8-or-8.1-key/

You can check activation in win 10 though.It's under the update/security settings page, on the left handside says 'activation'. MS are well chill about hardware/software upgrades as long as its 'legit' somewhere down the line.

AHH right thanks. I actually had to create a MS account for her as part of the W10 installation process. Do you think ms did some sort of hardware detection? I'd also formatted the hard drive prior to installation so figured I was doing a completely blank install.

I don't understand these new fangled laptops, I learned to install an OS to desktops by using fdisk in a 3.5 floppy to prepare the HDD!

 

[bainbridge]

I'm assuming it would be a hardware ID stored on the motherboard bios as @darael mentions so the harddrive wipe is irrelevant. They've also been very open with windows keys since getting people off vista. I think I last bought a win key then, for 30/20 quid from them directly and its rolled over through 7, 8-8.1, 10 for free. So it'll be an option for you if you want to move from 7 at any point.

They are pretty decent with it all though. I've recently changed a motherboard without needing to reinstall windows, and they just updated the hardware registration with a robot phonecall. It's a lot more resilient than the XP days.

Cool thanks, and thanks @darael for your input too.