So, I’ve been writing a 175k word One Piece fanfic for about 6 months. Most of my writing is done on a 10 year-old laptop I dug out of the closet while I wait for my kid to finish sports practice. Today, the hard-drive died. (Thankfully I have a cloud backup.)

Now, without a laptop, I have nothing to continue working on. I can’t afford a new laptop. Just glad I didn’t lose all my work.

    • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      24·
      2 days ago

      There’s a non-zero chance the license is stored on the motherboard of the laptop (ie, embedded in BIOS).

      • Nollij@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        12·
        2 days ago

        It’s nearly certain. OEM activation has been stored on the motherboard since XP. XP-7 required a matching OEM cert (easily found online), while 8+ have a unique license in the BIOS. For these, you just reinstall the OS, skip the key during setup, and let it connect afterwards for all of the updates and whatnot.

        Now, licenses to other apps, such as Word, are not so simple.

    • Bongles@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      That should be fine. I haven’t had to do it but everywhere I’ve seen says it’s tied to your hardware and it should be fine when you reinstall windows. Though with a dead laptop I’m not sure if you’re able to get a USB with the bootable media.

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Your license is tied to the laptop.

      Windows should remember the BIOS and activate fine, I think. And as posted below, you can extract they key if that doesn’t work.

      You can get the install medium on a USB stick from Microsoft for free.