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Bruce in North Hollywood, California listens the the Podcasts – now hosted by Blubrry and asked: “I’m buying a new laptop and a lot of the programs I purchased have registration keys. I’m wondering, are most registration keys tied to a specific piece of hardware like my laptop, or can they be transferred to a new laptop?”
Bruce, it will depend on the specific piece of software.
Some are tied to only to the license key and can be ported to other devices, others (famously Windows itself) will check the hardware theyre installed on and lock themselves to it.
For the most part you will be able to move licenses across computers, but there may be some hurdles not just with hardware but with the concept of active installations.
Lots of software products call home these days and you may find that a remote server thinks you have two active installations when you only paid for a single license.
If you run into that problem, uninstalling the software from your old laptop should eliminate the problem.
The most likely case is that youll be able to transfer your software – and nothing except for the OS itself will be locked to the old hardware, but your mileage may vary.
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