

Having an administrator account isn’t enough. To deactivate your old PC, you’ll need to open an elevated Command Prompt. Otherwise, there are some ways you can recover the product key from your old PC, including using Nirsoft’s Produkey. If you have a product box or digital receipt, grab it from there. How to Deactivate Your Old PCīefore you get started, make sure you have your Windows Key saved somewhere. Otherwise, you’ll have to take some extra steps. To keep things as simple as possible, transfer a Windows 10 Home key to a Windows 10 Home device, and a Windows 10 Pro key to a Windows 10 Pro device. If you enter a “Pro” key on a “Home” install, that too will fail with slmgr. Windows 7 and 8 keys will still activate Windows 10, but only through the standard activation process and not through slmgr. And while slmgr can deactivate any retail key (a key you purchased separately), it will only activate a key that matches the installed operating system. Manufacturers embed these keys to the hardware on which they originated, and transferring them to new devices won’t work. This won’t work for OEM keys, which are keys that came with a computer you bought in a store.

The slmgr command makes this reasonably straightforward, but you’ll want to keep in mind a few limitations. The good news is, it’s possible to deactivate a PC you no longer intend to use, then transfer that license to a new computer. So paying for another license when you want to decommission an old computer in favor of a new one isn’t a great option. And it’s not a good idea to buy cheap keys from sketchy websites.

At $100 to $200, an official product key from Microsoft costs about the same as a 1 TB solid-state drive, 16 GB of RAM, or a motherboard. Deactivate an Old PC Instead of Buying a New License
