Dead laptop, want to recover Win10 license

[Halaspa]

My wife bought this i5, 11th gen laptop.  Spilled coffee all over it.  It's toast.  No power, error code blinking next to power connection.  I've accepted it is toast, but am hoping to recover the Win 10 license.  My wife bought another laptop, same as previous laptop, but came with Win 11, which runs slow with only 8 Gigs RAM.  Want to take the old license, put it on new laptop.  Wife has been trying to get Win 11 laptop returned for one with Win 10.

I have the old laptop.  Serial number, proof of purchase, everything.  Can the old license be recovered?

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

The Windows 10 product key is encrypted in your notebook's BIOS and is tied to that specific motherboard.

It cannot be used on any other PC.

If you want to install W10 on your new notebook, it will work with the W11 product key in the PC's BIOS.

[Halaspa]

Excellent. Been trying to console my wife that we can use the new laptop and not have to pay for another license.  This is even better.

Out of curiosity, is there anything that could be done with the old laptop beside recycling?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

You could strip it for parts such as the memory, Wi-Fi adapter, and 256 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD, but it's very possible those parts may have been damaged too.

Keep the power adapter as a spare and recycle the notebook.

The local PC repair shop in our town takes broken PC's and printers, perhaps the one in your town will too.

They test and recycle the parts or send them to a company that recovers the small amount of gold from the various components such as the memory chips.

[Williamjoe]

EaseUS bootable data recovery software - Data Recovery Wizard with Bootable Media can get your data out of the dead laptop or computer hard drive with ease

Regards,

Will