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There was a lot of fuzziness surrounding authentication of Windows installations from 7-8 -> 10 as Microsoft (intentionally) allowed free upgrades to incentive folks to move up to the latest and greatest, but did so in such a way that you could do clean installations and still end up with a legitimate copy. They didn't really express it publicly as such, but if you even just had access to a Win7 or Win8 installation, you (for all practical intents and purposes) had the ability to install Win10 on any computer for 'free' as a result. Win10 would 'validate' as a result of being installed and detecting that you had a Win7 or Win8 license, in effect creating a new one.