kitekrazy1
Retail license allows you to move to a different machine, change hardware, ect. If you have a previous W7,W8 Retail license your Windows 10 will be a retail license.
If you have an OEM you will have to buy a new license every time you change MB and CPU.
That looks to be correct, although there are also tech journalists who have stated that the wording of statements that the upgrade is locked to the computer that it was originally installed on supersede the idea that the license rights conferred on the previous version are transferred to the new Win10 upgrade version. How many iterations of a retail version you can go back is a little vague. If you installed an XP upgrade on a full retail Win2K machine, then moved that to a new machine on the basis that it had inherited transfer rights from Win2K, then upgraded the new machine to Win7 upgrade then to Win 10 do you still inherit transfer rights? Win 7 OEM has been the only non-retail version of Windows that explicitly licensed a "system builder," i.e. someone who assembles his own machine for personal use rather than sale, to transfer his copy to another machine. Windows 8 does not license the OEM version to be used by such systems builders at all, so finding a right to transfer is problematic, and those built by Windows distributors are locked to the machine they are sold with. Windows 8 licensing removed that "system builder" license again. So is a Win7 OEM installed on a machine you built yourself upgraded to Win10 movable, but a Win 8 copy in the same situation tied to the machine? Perhaps the difficulty of working out niggling like this explains why so many people have had questionable activations approved by Microsoft phone support.
In any event, you will probably have to deal by phone with MS in the event that you move your copy to a new machine, as the activation robot will assume it is the same copy being installed on a second machine. Without a product key, the
usual method of deactivating or removing the product key from your old installation is problematic.