Jesus...can we come to a collective agreement? Each poster says something different... lol.
Opinions are like aholes... everyone has one.
haha drives ya potty.
Well, here's some more info.
OEM licence: grey area as the others have said and tied to the mobo. Activation should therefore technically fail if you've changed the mobo. Sounds like Microsoft will allow it in the name of marketshare though.
Retail licence: this includes the free upgrades from W7 retail. You are allowed to install W10 on as many different computers as you want, so long as it's only one at a time, ie none of the previous installations exist any more. If it won't activate automatically, then a phone activation should work.
Activation is really bound to your Microsoft account also, if I log in anywhere it activates automatically. It's been like that for a while.
Not true, it's bound to your hardware with a digital entitlement, as myself and others have described above. It also says this in the MS FAQ if you Google for it.
I have a real life example.
I had the free Insider W10 from the beta days activated in a VM and logged in with my Microsoft account. Some time after I made a copy of that VM onto a HDD so that it was installed directly on the PC. It worked, but came up unactivated and there was no way for me to activate it other than buying a retail key, which I didn't, so I abandoned it. I still have that VM copy and update it from time to time.