If you’re like me and use a lot of Virtual Machines (also known as VMs) you may be in need of moving around a product key to keep your Windows machines active and licensed. If you’re like me you take snap shots of your Virtual Machines in the case you destroy one of them with bad update or poorly written piece of code. Sometimes you may need to move your VM from physical to virtual or vice versa. In some cases you may just need to move a product key cause of server upgrade or other issues.
Moving a product key is simple using the product key command line tool slmgr. The procedure below shows how to use the slmgr tool to move a product key
- Open a command prompt as Administrator and type the following commands:
- slmgr –up This will remove the key first
- slmgr -ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx (replace the x with your product key) This will add your key
- Activate Windows by right clicking on computer
- Go down to windows activation
- Click Activate Windows and follow the steps it should take no longer than a minute to activate.
If you get any additional activation errors you may have other issues and you can call Microsoft support activation line.
Microsoft product key activation calls are free of charge to customers so don’t hesitate to call if you need assistance.