Those keys used for Win7 used to be locked to a specific hardware vendor and could be used on any other machine from that hardware vendor (given same edition of

Those keys used for Win7 used to be locked to a specific hardware vendor and could be used on any other machine from that hardware vendor (given same edition of Windows). This was done by special tables inserted in the BIOS, so to crack it you could actually patch your BIOS to emulate any vendor or use a bootloader which would emulate this. Only vendor-specific key + the table in the bios = unlocked Windows when using these keys. I hear they've changed it on newer ones and pirates have switched almost entirely to KMS activation server emulation, so I assume something's different in Win8+.