8 ms·
My biggest annoyance is that I specifically bought a Windows 11 license, from the MS store, using my MS account. I did this because I assumed that if something
by Night_Thastus 1y ago
My biggest annoyance is that I specifically bought a Windows 11 license, from the MS store, using my MS account. I did this because I assumed that if something went wrong, I would always be able to recover it. I could never 'lose' the key if it was tied to my account.
Well unfortunately, MS screwed me. When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.
Despite having one license, one account, and one PC registered, MS refused to help. I tried to call support, but there are NO on-call support anymore. Only automated online support. No chat. Nothing. I tried over and over for a couple days and got nowhere.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- behringer 1y agoSail the high seas and you'll never feel cheated again.
- edm0nd 1y agoJust use Massgravel and problem is solved :) https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
- oblio 1y agoLOL. I found that website today and thought it was named "mass grave".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- calvinmorrison 1y agoit is https://massgrave.dev/ https://massgrave.dev/
- dp-hackernews 1y agoThe website IS called that; https://massgrave.dev/ https://massgrave.dev/
- oblio 1y agoThe Github account is "mass gravel" :-?
- d3Xt3r 1y agoEven better, just switch to Linux. F** Microsoft.
- qingcharles 1y agoI have legit licenses for Win 11 and I still use massgrave as it's easier.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoLast I ever bothered to buy a CD key I got it off one of those gaming key sites. I have since moved on to Linux, but you can get a Pro key really cheap on those sites. I refuse to overspend to upgrade what should have been a computer with Windows Pro OOTB. If you spend over 2 grand on any computer you should not be getting Windows Home edition.
- sekh60 1y agoI have to ask, why even bother paying some key site? It is violating the terms of the license agreement anyway, so why not just pirate?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoI guess if things get ugly they have some (terrible) plausible deniability? “What do you mean my $10 Windows Enterprise key is stolen? I thought that was the going rate. Linux is free”
- pyrolistical 1y agoWho is violating the terms? The seller or the buyer? If it’s the seller, would Microsoft go after the buyer?
- sekh60 1y agoBoth. Microsoft would probably never go after the buyer, but I just wondered the justification people buying from the grey market are - legally speaking in many places, you're just paying money to pirate it - it's not a valid license.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoIt's even more pointless now that I've just given up on Windows and use Linux.
- observationist 1y agoCompanies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale. If Microsoft can't do it, if Apple, Google, Facebook, X , OpenAI can't do it, then maybe we shouldn't allow companies to operate at scales which inevitably lead to widespread consumer harm. They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle. This is a legislation and regulation issue - the data barons are exploiting the effective absence of any accountability for harms they casually inflict on the public, ranging from gotcha situations like the OP to viral self harm trends among kids to mass surveillance and commercial invasion of privacy. Pirate everything, support open source, pay content creators directly. If they want to have billions of users, they damn well better be able to handle each and every one of those users in a commercially responsible fashion, or they have no business operating at that scale. We should be done with the "oops, we're too big and we make too much money to care that we just casually wrecked your life, oh well!" If the solution is to force users to have to buy a new PC, or a new phone, or create a new account, or anything in that vein, it's almost intentional, and casually malicious. It's not like these companies don't know what they're doing, they can simply afford not to care. Until there's regulation and accountability that's more expensive than ignoring the consumer casualties, things will continue to get worse.
- lagniappe 1y ago>Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale. The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
- palmotea 1y ago> The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem. The key words are monopoly and lock-in. Those things can really scramble the bad vs good equation.
- dariusj18 1y agoI had a similar issue recently and was able to convince the AI agent to give me a phone number to talk to a support representative. They manually fixed my accout and key and gtg in a few minutes. What a PITA it took until I got a human though.
- jdc0589 1y agosame situation. I have 2 different licenses I've purchased via their store, hooked up to my account over the years, and none of them are recoverable.
- exe34 1y agocan you claim it through the small claims court? it's the kind of thing I'd do out of spite.
- Night_Thastus 1y agoI could, and maybe I should, but it's just too much effort, time, and money. It's not worth what I paid for the license. If the license was $10k that would be different.
- jcalvinowens 1y ago> When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it. This happened to me too! It's absolutely insane that a license I bought through my account can't be transferred somehow... My newest NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy, and I can reinstall on it repeatedly while keeping the activation, so at least we've got that going for us. But after Proton, all the machines in my house exclusively run Linux. I sincerely hope I never touch a windows machine again for the rest of my life :)
- SubiculumCode 1y agoI run Linux at home too. Its annoying, but I sometimes need to run Windows in a WM for Word, as the online version is crap on large complex documents where formatting matters, and interoperability with colleagues keeps me from using LibreOffice Write.
- d3Xt3r 1y agoHave you checked out OnlyOffice (not to be confused with OpenOffice)? It's MSO file format compatibility is vastly superior to LibreOffice, I use it work on files shared by colleagues using MSO and it works fine for the most part. The only issue I faced is with embedded ActiveX/VBA, like forms in a Word doc that might use radio buttons will get converted to static images. If you don't have weird stuff like that in your docs then you should be fine.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoI have. Its not bad at all. I also agree that it has better file compatibility. The main thing I came across is that not all the features that I expect are implemented yet, at least in their powerpoint/presentation application. Another issue that I face is that it is increasingly expected that their would be a shared Word document in OneDrive that multiple people can be working on simultaneously. Its really hard to win sometimes when the infrastructure is all against it. :(
- simmons 1y agoI was in this same situation earlier this year with one machine that was using a license attached to my Microsoft account. From what I read online, I thought I was freeing up the license by running "slmgr /upk" and "slmgr /cpky" on the old machine, but I guess not. I was eventually able to get the license transferred to the new machine, but only after a very painful morning of working with an MS support person. I learned that there are two ways of buying a Windows 11 license. One way results in getting a traditional license key that can be reliably transferred, and the other way (tying the license to your Microsoft account) risks losing your license. :( I'm very careful to only buy licenses the former way, now.
- tux1968 1y agoSo... what's the former way?
- simmons 1y agoIt's just a matter of buying from the right web page at Microsoft's web site. At least as of June, I was able to buy a license with a traditional license key here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h4 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
- dateSISC 1y agothe license is tied to your account in theory, if you log in with it, it should get activated?
- Night_Thastus 1y agoI wish it worked like that! Sadly, it does not. That's why I was using a MS account login instead of a local username/password - I thought that it would be 'automatic'. No such luck.
- throwaway984393 1y ago[dead]
- bastardoperator 1y agoI've been using groupon to get licenses for about 10-15 bucks.
- wombat-man 1y agoWow, this must be a recent change. My license somehow was disassociated from my machine. I was able to get someone to fix it over the phone after some basic troubleshooting. It was a little annoying it happened at all, but at least they fixed it.
- tstrimple 1y agoSomehow my decade plus expired MSDN licensed Windows keys are still working like champs across multiple machine activations. I think at this point if they stopped working I'd just drop Windows altogether.
- jofla_net 1y agoJoin the club. They 'stole' three Minecraft accounts from me. I tried their migration tool separately and all they were able to tell me was that old chestnut, "something happened".
- tomrod 1y agoThis appears to be endemic at Microsoft. I have two Minecraft accounts, several Live.com accounts accrued over the years, and a smattering of Github accounts for various reasons (professional, self-employed, personal), Logging into Minecraft java a week ago took me 7 logins across various different accounts -- and then it ALSO uses Xbox for auth, which I never set up. And then, the endpoint is blocked for my ISPs IP range so I had to use a VPN and try from a few locations. Bless you, Ohio.
- woleium 1y agoThis seems like a situation where you could run a pirate kms server and license yourself. I imagine you would gave a strong case should it come to trial.
- gamblor956 1y agoOddly, I have never bothered to buy a Windows 11 license and somehow do not have any issues with using Windows 11 on any of my computers. Some upgraded, some built from scratch. So the problem is that MS isn't even consistent about how it enforces licenses.
- mdavid626 1y agoCall support. They’ll recover the license for you.
- Night_Thastus 1y agoCan't. As I said, they don't have any on-phone support anymore. I tried for a couple days but it's not possible to reach a human anymore. No keywords like 'representative' work now. The try to offer automated support or redirect you to webpages, but that's it. The days of reaching a human at MS are gone.