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I have serveral Windows 7 machines I need to dispose of, some of these machines were brought with Windows 10 Pro pre installed. Someone then decided to downgrade these machines to Windows 7 and not make a note of what was downgraded (Before my time sadly otherwise some notes would have been made)

I would like to keep the machines that were downgraded and reinstall windows 10 back on it, is there any way to tell whats valid or would it just be a case of reinstalling Windows 10 and then seeing what does/doesnt have a valid license after the upgrade? (which I am trying to avoid due to the number of machines/time involved)

Thank you

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  • Though it's not officially supported or announced anywhere, the free upgrade still works if you do it this way - superuser.com/a/1512898/347380 So long as the Win7 is properly licensed, the Win 10 will be too.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented May 28, 2021 at 8:10
  • Thank you @Tetsujin I am wondering in the case of microsoft performing a license audit, would this be legal, by the looks of things it all appears ok. Thank you for the link.
    – Kev
    Commented May 28, 2021 at 8:59
  • Welcome. I've only ever done this as a consumer; unlikely to ever get an audit, so idk what would happen in a corporate situation. I do get the feeling that it's going to be impossible to tell after the fact, as it would have the same result as if it had been done back in 2016 as far as the licensing servers are concerned. After that, any clean re-install would already contain the entitlement. I think if they'd wanted this to go away, they could have removed the functionality. That they didn't hints they'd prefer people on Win10 than quibbling over a license.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented May 28, 2021 at 9:02

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If the machines came with win 10 pro preinstalled and they are from a big manufacturer like Dell/HP/Lenovo its very likely they have their Windows key embedded in UEFI and are as such already licensed. Even a clean windows 10 installation will 'just work' and will be 100% correctly licensed.

A simple check to see if a computer has an embedded license can be done by opening a command window and typing wmic path softwarelicensingservice get oa3xoriginalproductkey and check the output.

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  • Hi Silbee, that is exactly what i am after thank you, this command would only work on a machine with an embedded code, and that would only be the W10 downgrades in this scenario.
    – Kev
    Commented May 28, 2021 at 11:29
  • So turns out this doesnt work, if you run this query from a Windows 7 install you get an invalid Query response. Fortunately these were Dell machines (First time ive ever said that!) and I could run the Service tag threough their support portal, this could tell me what machines were downgrades.
    – Kev
    Commented Jun 3, 2021 at 14:29
  • Hey .. Thats weird, ive never had it fail on me. Worst that happened was an empty string when there's no bios embedded key. I'm glad you eventually found a way to determine the downgrades somewhat easely.
    – Silbee
    Commented Jun 3, 2021 at 18:42

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