Hello, I have acquired a dead Sony Vaio VGN- NW100 laptop that had been upgraded from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Hm Prem. I was able to buy a motherboard on EBAY that is the same Motherboard but the processor is a step or two better. can I still install this and be able to keep the OS activated and use it? I can reinstall Vista if I need to, but I would rather keep the Win 7 than Vista. Thanks for your help.
JRod
Most of the time when you make a major hardware change to a OEM computer that changes the hardware ID and you lose your activation. You may get lucky but I would say plan on losing activation.
Thanks for the response. I have Acronis True Image, can I use that to try to make the HDD bootable?
If all you did was swap motherboard like for like you should be able to simply boot the laptop with the original drive that was in it.
Hi,
At times if you change the Motherboard, it shows ‘Windows is not Genuine’ because the Product Key on older OS was integrated on older Motherboard.
Since you change the Motherboard, the Server tries to look for that older Motherboard with existing Product Key and therefore it shows an error.
You might need to re-install Windows.
Regards,
Steve
Tech Support Team