Windows 10

Not sure what you mean there. OEM keys can be applied to an unregistered windows 10.

I just did this not an hour ago.

If your Windows 10 is an upgrade from 7 and you use your MS account to sign in to Windows 10, you’ll fail to activate, run a troubleshooter, fail again, and eventually get a call from them, they have you run something in the run dialog, it pops up a key entry, you put your Windows 7 key in it, and you’re done.

I suppose if you don’t have your Win 7 key you’re screwed.

I believe it depends how you upgrade to your ‘free’ Windows 10. I have a Vista Ultimate which I later upgraded to Windows 8 Pro, when Microsoft have some promotion for a free Windows 8 upgrade. Then from Windows 8 Pro to Windows 10 Pro was a free upgrade. In Windows 10, I login using a Hotmail account and the license from this Windows 10 became a digital license linked to my Hotmail account.

I recently got a new hardware - new mobo, processor, RAM -and I use Media Creation tool to download Windows 10 image to the USB drive and install Win 10 via USB boot disk. After installation, I just entered my Hotmail account and Windows is activated. No calls needed to be made via phone nor do I need to enter my Vista Ultimate serial number. I do not have the Windows 8 nor Windows 10 serial number at all.

I believe that because my original Windows, which is the Vista Ultimate, was a retail copy and not an OEM, MS allow me to transfer to a new machine.

They will transfer OEM licenses too, you just need to call them. I’ve done it many times over the years.

I am waiting for Windows 11.

Now that Sat-Nad has said Privacy is a human right (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/01/satya_nadella_microsoft_future_decoded_keynote/) maybe we’ll see if the next version goes to to eleven without telemetry/‘experience’ and better QA.

Great movie by the way. Love the part where Nigel is showing off his guitars.

I don’t believe that MS equates telemetry with personal data, so I doubt any changes will come down the line.

Sat-Nad will do two things, 1) adhere to the EU laws on privacy in the EU and 2) jack shit everywhere else1.

1: Unless you count actively lobbying and donating to politicians to maintain their ability to monetize user activity through telemetry and advertising.

Fugin Windows deactivated on me last night. I have no idea where I might have the key for this machine. I was futzing around in the Settings UI (where it warned me I might have an illegitimate copy of Windows, nevermind that it’s been legit for the last 4 or 5 years) and I clicked on the troubleshooter (which I rarely do) and it fixed itself. It said it bound the activation to my Windows account, which I don’t even know what that means. I just wanted to pass it along, mention what worked for me, and see if anyone else is having similar issues. I suppose there was a recent Windows Update or something?

It’s a bug that surfaced in the last couple of days, but I haven’t seen word on the cause.

Wha? Wow, I’m glad I posted. Thank you LockerK! I hope I haven’t gotten demoted to home. I will have to check.

Happened to me this week, but it’s been fixed. Just run the troubleshooter in the Activation setting and you’ll be reactivated.

The deactivation started appearing on our work systems today. Since Microsoft has stated that it’ll resolve itself without intervention, I stopped going around and reactivating it via the troubleshooter. If it doesn’t fix itself by next week, will have to continue the fix manually, unfortunately.

This is getting annoying as heckersmith. I’ve been trying to activate my windows 10 build for 3 days now. Upgraded my hardware, no big deal I think. I pull a manual serial number off my build, but this was digital license so I should be able to just login with my MS account and it should transfer shouldn’t it? Or do I need to delete my old hardware profile to free it up. MS support said no, but they’ve been useless. So now, 3 days in a row I call miscrosoft activation and they tell me based on my error code (0xC004C003) to try again in 24 hours.

…and just got off the phone with tech support in a foreign land, and it keeps getting worse every time. Now that I confirmed the server issues are fixed, they keep trying to just dump me off the phone. I tell them the issue in detail as super nicely as I can, they say try again in 24 hours, I say talk to your supervisor, this server issue related to my code is no longer down, then they come back and say, “you’re right but we can’t help you. Just go buy it”. I say, I’m not going to buy it, I have a legitimate copy I was just using a few days ago with my old hardware. Grrrrrrr. This is reeduculous.

3rd call today and couldn’t believe it… got someone who actually wanted to help. Fixed. Wow I’m floored at how awful so many of these phone support people are. Not just that they don’t know what they’re doing, but that they literally don’t want to help.

It’s just a bug, supposedly will be fixed in a couple days. Don’t stress about it, win10 works fine unactivated, you just can’t change the wallpaper.

If I have a Windows 7 Pro key, can I use it for Windows 10 Pro using the flash drive download method? The only option it gives me for the edition is “Windows 10.”

One of the techs I talked to over the past 3 days says that should work. But then again, he steered me wrong on everything else, so take that with a grain of salt.

It worked, Windows 10 Pro.

Kind of a random question from 2010 for you all: do you install certain games and utilities to a folder outside of Program Files to make it easier to edit files? I never dealt with this on my old PC since I had a separate drive for games, emulators, etc. For this single drive PC I figured I’d install everything at the default location. I forgot about the downsides!