

However, to some Windows 7 users, it's still necessary to record and keep the product key.

As time goes by, Windows 7 is no longer supported by Microsoft anymore. Windows 7, as a classic operating system, attracted quite a lot of fans when the system was first released. On this page, we'll take Windows 7 as an example to present 7 reliable ways for you to follow and find the Windows 7 key successfully on your own. If you have a retail license, you can wipe out the hard drive on the old computer, and then transfer the license to the new hardware to activate Windows 11.Windows key, also known as Windows product key, is normally used for activating Windows operating systems on computers. While you can use product keys from older versions to activate Windows 11, you can only do this on the device that originally was activated since you cannot transfer the license to another device unless you have a retail version of Windows. At the end of the day, Microsoft only wants people to upgrade their devices to the latest version of its operating system. Instead, the company makes the most revenue from cloud services and other products. Perhaps one of the primary reasons that the product keys from Windows 7, 8.1, and 10 work to activate Windows 11 is that Microsoft doesn’t make much of its revenue selling desktop licenses for consumers. However, even after the promotion expired, users could still activate their devices with a genuine license from an older version of the operating system. The free upgrade was offered for a limited time. When Windows 10 was first released in 2015, Microsoft offered the operating system as a free upgrade for devices running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. Instead, it’s a more mature version of Windows 10 with a new user interface, so the same upgrade path available on Windows 10 should also be available for Windows 11. It’s not a big surprise that you can use product keys from older versions to activate since Windows 11 is not an entirely new system.
