My activation originally was with Vista, upgraded mobo and HW many times since then since I'm still on the base install just inplace upgraded OS each time lol. Surprised it hasn't prompted once yet to re-activate.
Did you disable the onboard? MAC address might be a fairly significant part of the hash.Pretty sure mine is from around that time too. So was surprised it came up for such a small hardware change.
Did you disable the onboard? MAC address might be a fairly significant part of the hash.

More seemingly positive news coming out in that there is talk of moving back to actual native apps not the web wrapped frameworks


Well I'm annoyed
I loaded up Battlefield 6 and it did shaders like a new nvidia driver was installed, yet the one I installed over a week ago was the 581.89! Checking MSI Afterburner and it showed 591.86 which is a completely different driver, a driver installed by Windows Update.
So I checked Windows Update and sure enough Successfully installed on 31/03/2026.
Because of that Windows Update issue whereby some systems were affected by BSOD's and performance issues ( it was recalled ) I had turned everything is OFF, including services (disabled) to stop these updates coming over.
I have NEVER allowed Windows to install it's own crappy drivers
So yeh, it's forced installed and turned services back on. I thought this **** wasn't going to happen anymore![]()
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Neil, you have so many issues that I am starting to think there is some pebkac going on here mate![]()

I use Explorer Patcher which allows me to make it look like Windows 10 along with quick Launch feature back which was removed from 11.Can I customise the start menu so I only have apps? Or do I need start is back or similar software? I've done a clean install due to new motherboard and NVMe drive and I figured I'd try vanilla Windows 11 out for a bit before using something like CTT. But the start menu is just so bad.