Hey guys, recently I got a computer from a friend - just for fixing his laptop problems - hey free is awesome
😛Anyway, my Sister and I decided to get it going again for her 9yr old Daughter to use for school and she wanted to get Windows 8. So, she got it through a local shop for the cheap price. I upgraded the RAM(DDR2) and she bought a new LCD monitor for it. Long story short, after having this freebie system running for 3 weeks, the computer crapped out...motherboard just up and died....so, My Sister panicking had to get her kid another PC for school, good ole Uncle Myk to the resuce!!! I bought a new ASUS AMD Mobo(M5A78L-MLX v2) and brand new Corsair CX500M PSU. Luckily I had 8GB RAM spare plus my FX 4100 that wasn't being used...Got the brand new system booted with the original HDD that was in the old freebie PC and suddenly something very odd happened....
I wasn't expecting to see Windows 8 loading from the hardware change, but, it did. Made necessary changes to boot properly and then came the time to reactivate Windows8Pro....it came up saying "Windows has been installed on another Computer. Maximum upgrades limit has been used"...oh boy....i'm guessing the cheap edition of Windows 8 is OEM and locked to the NIC of the old Motherboard. Told my Sister that she had to call MS Australia and explain what happened with the old PC and she was given a new activation code.
So, to sum it all up. Windows 8 *can* actually be moved from PC to PC and run from 1st boot, but, you need to reactivate of course.
Hopefully this will be handy info if anyone here has recently installed Windows8 and their Motherboard dies/died on them.