Cannot Activate Windows

[Pulseammo]

With you mentioning secure boot and TPM, that makes me wonder how Microsoft might embed that hardware into their activation string and the TPM and secure boot keys could be a form of identifier? I wouldn't have expected that, since it is only recently that they were even required for Windows installs, but it does make me hesitant to mess with these features once they're enabled.

I've read that Microsoft uses the SMBIOS table as part of the "hardware" ID - and I think possibly that gets changed when you re-flash bios, or possibly the values described by that structure change when you update the bios and that's what kicks it off thinking you've changed the whole motherboard possibly?

I don't really know, it's all just bits and pieces I've read in threads.

When I went to flash the bios it did give me a warning to suspend bitlocker and anything else that relied on the TPM. When I first booted back into windows I had to make a new pin for windows hello (since that's in the TPM too). I've not noticed anything else I've had to re-enable or setup again though.

 

[Tetras]

I've read that Microsoft uses the SMBIOS table as part of the "hardware" ID - and I think possibly that gets changed when you re-flash bios, or possibly the values described by that structure change when you update the bios and that's what kicks it off thinking you've changed the whole motherboard possibly?

I don't know enough about the BIOS to say, but I do think they've changed something recently (or at least made it more fussy). I wonder if they realised how many free upgrades were given out and now that adoption of Windows 10/11 is decent, they're trying to claw some of that money back. It seems like you have to use your PC like a Dell and the best you can hope for is a RAM upgrade

 

[Removed User 345456]

I don't want to pay Microsoft £200 for a key, which I already owned and was granted upgrades to through their own programmes, I feel slightly rug pulled that a BIOS update, which isn't a hardware update, de-activated the key. Hence I'm hoping MS support will sort this out for me (I don't hold my breath). I'm literally willing to start using linux as my daily to a) avoid a grey area key and b) avoid paying £200.

As for CDKeys, my understanding was that they were not as shady as G2A and Kinguin, which I have never used, because the other two are market places where you do get scammers and thieves buying keys with stolen CCs and reselling the keys. My impression was that suppliers who send the keys themselves (like CDKeys) are simply buying them from another region, and yes, regional pricing does exist - example of just how much cheaper that can be. None the less, I know you said not specifically about me, but I never "bragged" about this, I just took your bait which you decided to throw in because you obviously wanted to start posting about this subject and call out people's hilarity, my bad.

Incidentally if it's a small indie dev I just buy the game from steam, or their own site, or whatever supports them more, I really don't feel like I should have to defend my use (let me re-iterate: TWICE out of hundreds of games) of a shop. This is derailing the thread.

Yeah man as I say **** Microsoft. Rubbish compared to the constant stability something Unix based like macOS (closed source BSD) provides or Linux. Love me some linux, but prefer mac's and the erm home made type we can't mention on here (which I daily along with genuine macs).

Nah don't believe that nonsense they're all scumbags, if it was regionally simple, you'd just use a VPN and buy off Steam in another region... It's all just smoke and mirrors man, all these key sites steal the keys, it's really that simple.

Yeah supporting Indie Devs FTW. I love doing that with tiny bits of usual software too, for example on my Mac's I have NTFS for macOS which is made by Paragon - not an indie small dev, but it was something stupid like £13.99 per machine license, for something so useful that they could easily have charged £30-40, so no brainer buying it legit.

And yeah DW I was accusing you of bragging mate, I just always like to ask the question regarding which you pay full money to the devs to.

Jokes aside though my original comment about buying a key to save you days of ball ache was genuine, after all they're not paying for you your time/hassle trying to make something that should work that you've paid for work... Scumbaggy M$ for you though eh!

On macOS you don't even pay for it and can legally share it with 5 people in your household! And there's no serial key/requirement to register anything, and telemetry is a simple no thankyou button and there's no sneaky stuff enabled/requiring hacking out.

My sig in my rig is purely powered on for gaming in Win10 and that's it and lives under the tv. It never gets used for anything else. Has all the nonsense removed, no M$ account associated or nothing (thanks Rufus) and yep £4.83 for a key **** M$!

It will only be upgraded when either a new DirectX comes out/it's a requirement to play a certain game I want.

 

[Pulseammo]

Righty. So after 5 days of my original support ticket being unanswered (and opening 2 other tickets), I finally opened a support ticket in a different category (Other Issues -> Windows, instead of Windows -> Activation). Which gave me an instant live chat option. After a completely pointless 2.5h live chat with MS support with solutions such as "Disable all your non windows services" (speaking of which I better re-enable those to get my backup manager working again ) and "Perform a repair install using the ISO", I think the support agent finally (even after telling him about 4 times) clocked that my digital license on my account was for windows 7 and that is indeed the problem.

Support agent told me they can't alter any digital licenses that's all controlled by "the system". I can't be 100% sure the support agent was giving me valid information but it seems like these free upgrades were along the lines of "Windows 10 / Windows 11 will activate off of a Windows 7 digital license during the grace period", rather than "Your digital license is now upgraded from a Windows 7 license to a Windows 11 license." Don't quote me on this but if the Windows 7 Digital License had generated an activation inside the grade period, assuming no hardware ID changes, I think you could still re-install your OS. But for hardware change using the "I've changed hardware" doesn't seem to move the activation, it checks the original digital license and re-generates an activation which a Windows 7 license is now ineligible to do for Windows 11.

 

[Mcnumpty2323]

Yeah that tallies with what I said
Apart from don't believe for a second
Yeah I am a cynic lol
That they couldn't give you a new serial/re-activate you
They've just been told not to
My opinion on it anyway

 

[Pulseammo]

Yeah that tallies with what I said
Apart from don't believe for a second
Yeah I am a cynic lol
That they couldn't give you a new serial/re-activate you
They've just been told not to
My opinion on it anyway

I've never worked a support job so I don't know how much you're generally entrusted with in that role. You could maybe imagine someone going rogue and just pumping out windows licenses for a small fee like some kind of black market passport dealer .

I asked if there's a support team that deals with only activation hoping there would be some kind of second line support but I just got the "We're the support you're looking for, we are Windows Technical Support Experts and can deal with activation issues." The guy was trying but meh, what more is there to say really? .

Edit:
Oh incidentally the final piece of advice was to "Buy a Windows 10 or 11 license to be able to re-activate."

 

[Mcnumpty2323]

I've never worked a support job so I don't know how much you're generally entrusted with in that role. You could maybe imagine someone going rogue and just pumping out windows licenses for a small fee like some kind of black market passport dealer .

I asked if there's a support team that deals with only activation hoping there would be some kind of second line support but I just got the "We're the support you're looking for, we are Windows Technical Support Experts and can deal with activation issues." The guy was trying but meh, what more is there to say really? .

Edit:
Oh incidentally the final piece of advice was to "Buy a Windows 10 or 11 license to be able to re-activate."

It's sort of like if you phone your isp
I have phoned been told emphatically no we can't do that
Hung up phoned back 10 minutes later
Different support agent
Yeah OK we will do that

So yes in my experience
It can depend who you get on support
Though with this affecting lots of people
It may well be they have been told
Do not do it under any circumstances
Just tell them they need to buy a new key
Everything will of course be logged on their systems
So any agent doing something they've been told not to
Could very well be detected if they wanted to

 

[Removed User 345456]

Righty. So after 5 days of my original support ticket being unanswered (and opening 2 other tickets), I finally opened a support ticket in a different category (Other Issues -> Windows, instead of Windows -> Activation). Which gave me an instant live chat option. After a completely pointless 2.5h live chat with MS support with solutions such as "Disable all your non windows services" (speaking of which I better re-enable those to get my backup manager working again ) and "Perform a repair install using the ISO", I think the support agent finally (even after telling him about 4 times) clocked that my digital license on my account was for windows 7 and that is indeed the problem.

Support agent told me they can't alter any digital licenses that's all controlled by "the system". I can't be 100% sure the support agent was giving me valid information but it seems like these free upgrades were along the lines of "Windows 10 / Windows 11 will activate off of a Windows 7 digital license during the grace period", rather than "Your digital license is now upgraded from a Windows 7 license to a Windows 11 license." Don't quote me on this but if the Windows 7 Digital License had generated an activation inside the grade period, assuming no hardware ID changes, I think you could still re-install your OS. But for hardware change using the "I've changed hardware" doesn't seem to move the activation, it checks the original digital license and re-generates an activation which a Windows 7 license is now ineligible to do for Windows 11.

What lovely useless customer service!

Now you won't feel remotely bad about spending a fiver elsewhere to activate it eh

 

[Pulseammo]

What lovely useless customer service!

Now you won't feel remotely bad about spending a fiver elsewhere to activate it eh

Not sure I'll be spending my fiver at all, I think for the short term I'm going to put up with the watermark since there doesn't seem to be much functionality loss. I think there's rumblings that windows 12 could be coming this year, wondering if they'll finally bite the bullet and make the OS free for home use, so I'd hate to spend the money for a legit license only for that to happen.

Other than that I've got a spare drive which I think I'll test drive linux on at some point, I've been making sure all of my software choices run cross platform for years now so I can't see any issue whatsoever in moving over apart from gaming, but even browsing ProtonDB I didn't find a single game that I play that wouldn't run. I'd likely still dual boot, the only issue I can foresee there is sometimes I'd want to load/update a game on windows steam but I'd be in the wrong OS, dunno if there's some tool to download a gamecache outside of the client.

And yeah I found the "support" pretty poor, but I've found most of these massive companies don't have good home user support, they just don't spend any money on it.

 

[Removed User 345456]

Not sure I'll be spending my fiver at all, I think for the short term I'm going to put up with the watermark since there doesn't seem to be much functionality loss. I think there's rumblings that windows 12 could be coming this year, wondering if they'll finally bite the bullet and make the OS free for home use, so I'd hate to spend the money for a legit license only for that to happen.

Other than that I've got a spare drive which I think I'll test drive linux on at some point, I've been making sure all of my software choices run cross platform for years now so I can't see any issue whatsoever in moving over apart from gaming, but even browsing ProtonDB I didn't find a single game that I play that wouldn't run. I'd likely still dual boot, the only issue I can foresee there is sometimes I'd want to load/update a game on windows steam but I'd be in the wrong OS, dunno if there's some tool to download a gamecache outside of the client.

And yeah I found the "support" pretty poor, but I've found most of these massive companies don't have good home user support, they just don't spend any money on it.

If you have a look online, there is a couple registry things you can do to remove it *mod's please edit this post if I've been naughty* but yeah.

Try Linux Mint, I used to run that loads, it doesn't have that disgusting window manager/gui that all the current distros use, so it feels very friendly, and more importantly, doesn't look aids!

Yeah my mate has had nothing but sucess with Proton <3

I love how they didn't even get back to you after 5 days and you had to start again, really care about their customers and the money they've spent! Pfft!

 

[Pulseammo]

I love how they didn't even get back to you after 5 days and you had to start again, really care about their customers and the money they've spent! Pfft!

I asked the support agent what was going on there and he said "Oh you don't get phone support unless you have an MS 365 subscription"... I told him yeah but when you select "Windows -> Activation problems" from the support ticket creator that "phone me back" is the only option, but when I selected "Other -> Windows" then live chat became the only option. No mention of 365 anywhere, but if others in this thread need to get in contact with support it's easier to go through the wrong category.

 

[Removed User 345456]

I asked the support agent what was going on there and he said "Oh you don't get phone support unless you have an MS 365 subscription"... I told him yeah but when you select "Windows -> Activation problems" from the support ticket creator that "phone me back" is the only option, but when I selected "Other -> Windows" then live chat became the only option. No mention of 365 anywhere, but if others in this thread need to get in contact with support it's easier to go through the wrong category.

So basically "no buy something else and I might consider helping you!"

 

[Snapshot]

Not sure I'll be spending my fiver at all, I think for the short term I'm going to put up with the watermark since there doesn't seem to be much functionality loss. I think there's rumblings that windows 12 could be coming this year, wondering if they'll finally bite the bullet and make the OS free for home use, so I'd hate to spend the money for a legit license only for that to happen.

Probably next year now as, according to El Reg, W11 24H2 is in development.

 

[Rroff]

I've had issues activating/re-activating some of my Windows 7 and 10 VMs lately using fully legit retail or volume license, something seems to have changed and they don't seem to be on top of it.

 

[coupe69]

Righty. So after 5 days of my original support ticket being unanswered (and opening 2 other tickets), I finally opened a support ticket in a different category (Other Issues -> Windows, instead of Windows -> Activation). Which gave me an instant live chat option. After a completely pointless 2.5h live chat with MS support with solutions such as "Disable all your non windows services" (speaking of which I better re-enable those to get my backup manager working again ) and "Perform a repair install using the ISO", I think the support agent finally (even after telling him about 4 times) clocked that my digital license on my account was for windows 7 and that is indeed the problem.

Support agent told me they can't alter any digital licenses that's all controlled by "the system". I can't be 100% sure the support agent was giving me valid information but it seems like these free upgrades were along the lines of "Windows 10 / Windows 11 will activate off of a Windows 7 digital license during the grace period", rather than "Your digital license is now upgraded from a Windows 7 license to a Windows 11 license." Don't quote me on this but if the Windows 7 Digital License had generated an activation inside the grade period, assuming no hardware ID changes, I think you could still re-install your OS. But for hardware change using the "I've changed hardware" doesn't seem to move the activation, it checks the original digital license and re-generates an activation which a Windows 7 license is now ineligible to do for Windows 11.

I applaud you for your patience, but don't you think it would have been easier just to purchase a cheap key online? You seem to have spent a huge amount of your time on this which is surely worth considerably more than a £5 activation key?