Activation pairs your product key with your hardware configuration and helps verify that your copy of Windows hasn’t been used on more computers than the Microsoft Software License Terms allow. Usually, you need to activate Windows only once, unless you make a significant hardware change.
Genuine Windows, however, is a recurring process that checks your product key to make sure it’s not blocked or being used on different hardware than what your product key was originally paired with when you activated Windows. If the product key is found to be non-genuine, or not valid, it’s likely that the product key is either being used on another computer or is counterfeit.
The genuine, or validation, check is performed each time your computer attempts to contact Microsoft. For example, when your computer downloads updates, Windows checks to see if your product key is valid. If it is, Windows on your computer is genuine. If it’s not, your computer is running non-genuine Windows so you won’t be able to keep Windows up to date, which might expose your computer to security risks, such as viruses, worms, and other malicious software.
To get a genuine copy of Windows, go to the genuine Windows website and check to see if your copy of Windows is genuine. If it’s not, follow the instructions to buy a new product key.
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Sir can you explain more in “Activation”? What if I change my motherboard. So the hardware configuration is significantly change. So this is required for windows to activate again. How many activation is require to your license? What if the activation are used, what will happen and what will you do to activate windows?
Thanks sir for this great article.
If you change your motherboard than you have to activate and verify your windows license via phone. you can activate your license on your PC as many time as you want without any major hardware changes. In certain cases if your online activation do not works, activate it via phone.
to do this: go to computer properties and select the option: ‘show me other ways to activate windows’
Actually there are OEM and Retail licenses which differ in their usage. OEM is cheaper and is tied to the motherboard. When some part is changed is no problem, but when motherboard dies, then new license should be bought. OEM is tied to only one PC and can be transfered to another.
Retail can be install on different computers without no problem.
you are right but if a retail license is activated on a system, then it won’t be activated on another PC. if you planned to do major upgrades in your PC’s hardware, in that condition you have to get your retail license activated via phone system by talking to a Microsoft customer support executive……online activation will not work in that case.
Indeed, retail license can be activated only on one system at a time. But the thing is, that it can be transfered to another PC. Of course these means that that retail license can be used only on one PC at a time and not on multiple computers.
But, OEM license does some things with bios and therefore is tied to motherboard.
Motherboard dies, license dies.
Hardware upgrades(except motherboard) can be done with OEM license with no problems regrading license. Activation on other hand, is another story and you probably know more that me.
Ended up here on the search for some thing entirely else, but ended up to be a cool read anyway, so I guess sometimes it’s ok that you can’t use a search engine properly.
Wasn’t exactly what I had been searching for but started reading the first few lines and it was interesting so ended up reading the whole post, thanks.
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Great post thx!