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I got bit by these "major" hardware changes on a computer I'd passed on to my relatives. For whatever reason I had had the onboard Ethernet adapter disabled in
by eMSF 7y ago
I got bit by these "major" hardware changes on a computer I'd passed on to my relatives. For whatever reason I had had the onboard Ethernet adapter disabled in BIOS when I upgraded from Windows 7 to 10, and enabling it prevented Windows from activating at all. (FWIW, it was not a laptop.)
Unlike in the past, when all you had to do was call in and recite your license key, these days their policy is to accept nothing else but a proof of purchase, which in my case was from almost 10 years prior. Luckily enough, I had it archived.
- devy 7y agoYeah, the exact definition of "major" hardware change is kept as a secret by Microsoft so that it's not easy to defeat that activation mechanism for pirates. The newer version (version 1511 and above) of Windows 10's digital licenses are essential a private key (as in asymmetric cryptography, called digital entitlement[1], stored in UEFI), as opposed to the a 25-character product key we used before. If for whatever reason the activation program cannot find that key, it won't be activated. [1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12440/windows-10-activation https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12440/windows-10-ac... > which in my case was from almost 10 years prior. Luckily enough, I had it archived. If you bought your Windows license online with a Gmail address, Google has you covered. https://myaccount.google.com/purchases https://myaccount.google.com/purchases