I can fully understand that when you buy an upgrade licence, you are upgrading your PC from X to Y.
This will also allow that PC to go back from Y to X should you wish it to, and this will then free up that upgrade to go onto another PC instead, to upgrade that from X to Y
This is fine.
What I do not like, is when you have a PC that has X installed on it, and you then buy Y and install Y instead, then that makes the older no longer used X, null and void.
I can sort of accept it, since most PCs come with X anbd you have bought a new version of Y and installed it, then sure, as the original X licence was for that one PC, yo ucannot transfer it, and putting Y onto it, sort of makes its original X null and void, but what if you then introduced another version Z?
What if both Y and now Z were full retail versions, and you used your Y to upgrade your original X and now you installed Z, would that make your Y now obsolete? Since its retail, even though you used it to upgrade X to Y, since you now have Z to upgrade that Y to Z, surely you can now use Y on a completely diffrent PC as it is now freed up?
Is any of this actually clear?
I myself own a whole load of PCs and they are all as far as I can tell, fully legal, and yet I have gone about things in a way that certainly does look questionable
For obvious reasons, I have NOT put the Licence sticker onto any of the cases, because I often swap cases around, but instead, I do have my licences all together in my filing cabing and I have USB Drives with various installs on. I nfact I am using a multiple booter with multiple versions on them, as I find this so much better as it has most of the updates etc already installed and so it saves me gigs of downloads of updates and so on.
But I have had a fair number of PCs go through a fair number of Versions of Windows, and it has been like this for as far back as I can remember. My main PCs are all relatively new and so they have only had 7 8 or 18 on, but I have done the Win2K to XP to XP64 to Vista then back to XP64 cos Vista was useless to Win 7 then at one time I had 13 PCs all running 7 and when Vista SP2 came out, that waswhen I found it more stable and I had bought me a few licences of vista cheaply second user, and now I am in the position where my 2 mains PCs are 10, and the rest are 8.1 or 7 and only one is Vista ( andits staying as Vista for messing about and testing etc ) but they have all, with the exception of my Skylake, undergone a whole llist of going from X to Y and back to X and even down to W just to get my best machines to run the best O/S and some are upgrade licences and some are full retail and in a haughty naughty way, some are simply licences that I have stanley knifed off old machines and while they have activated, sometimes eve nwith having to phone up MS, and so in reality they are naughty, they are also still legal ( sort of ) too!, but with the ones that I know should be fully legal and done in teh right way, I just know they might not be, and the ones that I know are funky, are probably fully legal.
All I know, is that I currently own 17 PCs, 11 are fully setup and running and yet I have over 30 retail licences that I ahve bought fair and sqaure, and about the same that are "recovered" and so while I have sometimes gone from X to Y in a naughty way, I could have just as well gone a nice way, I just could not have been bothered maybe because I have used custom or sometimes experimental installs... Such as pre-set ones that will boot and fully update with zero user interaction, so I can just start it off and then come back in an hour and it has fully updates from X to Y using completely illegal versions of completely illegal operating systems, but I still went from a legal version to a legal vesion.
God, I love waffling dont I? - Thats Asbergers OCD for you!