Hey guys, thinking about trying to install windows 10 education to a vm now to redeem the product key before it expires as I plan on using that VM for my laptop. How would you go about installing it on to a physical computer?
Do you just need the product key or the whole installation?
For the key a clean install onto the laptop would be easiest.
For the whole OS then cloning the install onto a external drive and cloning that to the laptop would be one method. Just be sure the VM environment supports UEFI and make sure Windows installs as UEFI because converting it after the fact is sometimes tricky.
My best guess, you need to find the product key off the running OS
then download a fresh copy of Windows 10, do a clean install, then enter the product key when asked.
@David_Loder it sounds like you want to create a VM now, and then later move that VM to your Framework? If that’s the case, the choice will really depend on what OS you’re using now and what you’ll use on the Framework. If you’re running Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise now and you’re going to run Windows Pro/Enterprise on the Framework, you can use Hyper-V to create a VM and then move it. If you’re not using Pro/Enterprise but still using Windows, you can use something like VMware Player or Workstation or Oracle’s VirtualBox.
I think VirtualBox and VMware Workstation will allow you to ‘virtualize’ the processor type, so you won’t trigger the message to re-license the VM when the hardware platform changes. Since you’re not using an OEM license it’s not strictly necessary - it’s just more of a convenience (I moved a W10 Edu license from a desktop to a Framework laptop and just re-entered the product key).
VMware and Virtualbox are both available on Linux as well, so if either of your host computers (your current and/or your new Framework) are running Linux you should be able to move the VMs across without too much trouble.
I can saw that when using Workstation (Vmware) I have never had Windows need to reauthenticate when moving the VMs between laptops. They were all Intel based, but different generations. Should be good. Although I’m not sure how other hypervisor obfuscate the hardware details of the host. So YMMV on something like Virtualbox, etc.