When Written: 24th March 2016
I like many have finally upgraded my Windows 8.1 machine to 10. This I did using my Action Pack subscription. I have already done one of the other machines in the office and all went well so I was pretty confident that it was safe to do this upgrade to my main work machine.
All went fine and I was able to carry on using all my programs as before. However I noticed that Windows was reporting that it needed activating. Not problem I thought, and went to the activation screen in settings. Clicking on the activate button returned and error. I then noticed that the product key shown was different to the one supplied with my Action Pack version of Windows 10. Ah Ah ! I thought, I need to change that!
Clicking on the ‘change product key’ button just caused the option to grey out and hang, only to be cleared with a reboot.
After a lot of searching and trialing I eventually found a solution that worked for me.
1. Open a CMD window with Administrator privileges.
2. Type “slmgr.vns /dlv”
This will open a panel showing a lot of info, the thing you need is the ‘Application ID’ and long string of numbers and letters.
3. Type “slmgr /upk
This will remove the current product key from your installed copy of Windows.
4. Type “slmgr /ipk
If all goes well it should tell you that the product keys was installed and your copy of windows is now activated.
I hope this helps anyone else in a similar position.
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton