How to confirm that the licensing for a fresh install of Windows 10 is active and valid?

Question

A trusted local computer shop provided a magical thumb drive, and after installing Windows I get:

PS C:\Users\saund>
PS C:\Users\saund>
PS C:\Users\saund> [System.Environment]::OSVersion.Version

Major  Minor  Build  Revision
-----  -----  -----  --------
10     0      19045  0


PS C:\Users\saund>
PS C:\Users\saund>  wmic  path softwarelicensingservice get OA3xOriginalProductKey
OA3xOriginalProductKey
XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX

PS C:\Users\saund>

where the product key is displayed, of course. From the seller, on Amazon, they said that the Motherboard is registered and that all that's required is to install Windows.

Not sure what I was doing wrong, but for now this thumb drive would seem to have installed Windows correctly. Leaving aside security concerns, what can be done to ensure that the licensing is up to par and correct?

For context, I had installed Linux but now need Windows. It was purchased refurbished, but the company selling was quite responsive about licensing inquiries. They said to just install Windows 10 pro 64 bit.

Windows Script Host:

for licensing details.

Answer 1

From the seller, on Amazon, they said that the Motherboard is registered and that all that's required is to install Windows.

That's fairly common – Windows 10 activation causes a "digital license" to be registered at Microsoft, which will automatically be used in future installations on the same hardware even if you only provide a "generic" product key. (Microsoft's website has a table of such keys for each edition.)

So a refurbished mainboard is very likely to have one. If cscript slmgr.vbs /dlv says that you are on the OEM_DM channel then that's what you have.

If you want to be slightly more sure, you could replace your magical thumb drive with a regular Windows 10 thumb drive and see if it picks up the license. (Either automatically or after inserting the generic product key.)

Though note that there are methods to manually cause a digital license ticket to be generated and accepted by Microsoft even without having an actual license, e.g. this was possible to do using the "upgrade from Windows 7/8" procedure when it was still active. So you can never be 100% sure of whether the digital license was fully legitimate, although it doesn't really matter in the end – once the digital license has been issued it won't go away.

(On the other hand, if you were to find the system is on a KMS channel and it's not a corporate managed machine with a legitimate use case for KMS, then it would definitely indicate a fake KMS server being used to activate without a license, which is something I would suspect a ~magic~ USB stick to do.)

Answer 2

Running slmgr.vbs /dlv brings a Windows Script Host popup saying, amongst other things:

License Status:  Licensed
Remaining SKU rearm limit:  1001

So I much appreciate that suggestion, Grawity. Speaking for myself, I find that a much clearer result than that everything seems to be working. The explicit "Licensed" was exactly the litmus test I was looking for.