PeterC wrote:
On Mon, 27 Nov 2017 12:22:20 -0500, Paul wrote:

Davej wrote:
Just ordered a new pc but now think I might want to change out the SSD that it comes with for a larger SSD. Problem is that win10 will be on the original SSD. Can this be moved? Thanks.
I'm running off a clone right now,
on my other PC. A Win10 clone. No problem.

As long as the clone is booting on the same
PC as the original installation, you won't
have a problem.

Paul

That's what I did - W7 on HDD, clone via Macrium, put in SSD and away it
went. No mutterings from the OS.

You can still tip one over when cloning.

If you've been making a lot of changes to
hardware, and then you clone, the cloning step
*can* break it. The algorithms aren't documented,
but hardware changes each have a weighting with
regard to de-activating the OS. Normally, disk
cloning (i.e. changing the serial number the
OS is sitting on), counts for little, which is
why you get away with it. But if you just doubled
the RAM, changed the processor from a dual core to
a quad core, then cloned the disk drive from HDD to
SSD and tried to boot... It might tip over.
It would say you have 72 hours to re-activate,
or it could even freeze on you. I've had setups
where the loss of activation caused the OS to
drop dead on me.

Due to the lack of documentation, it's difficult
to be more precise than that.

I can say, that my recent attempts to clone, have
not led to trouble. That means I've stopped changing
hardware enough, for the OS to let me off the hook.

The only attempt at documenting this, is here, for
an old OS. Not every OS after this description,
is guaranteed to behave exactly the same.

http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.htm

Since certain activities receive support from MS,
if your motherboard breaks and you're worried about
moving your copy of Windows 10, you can contact MS
and they can help you. Apparently there is some capability
to move a digital entitlement. I suppose it would help
if you collected all your details (winver, slmgr /dlv,
system control panel) before something like that happens.
Doing so could save you a few bucks, on a new OS.

Paul