I love when one of the richest companies on Earth (2nd by market cap, only behind Apple) just doesn’t make enough money that they need to consider this bullshit. Fuck this infinite profit growth. This is so fucking stupid. Everything is a god damn subscription. Gotta wring out every penny from our customers as the good Lord intended.
yes it does seem that way, but have you considered that maybe we should just all give all of our money to Microsoft and then just die of poverty? It would make their reports look so much nicer.
This is what happens when one part of their business (Game Pass) does well and they want to translate that success to other operations. What they don’t realize is that Windows is less a product and more a service, and you can’t make money on services. Not for long, anyway.
Right, but I meant a service in the traditional sense, like trains or food stamps or whatever. Windows is so ubiquitous with operating a PC at this point, and they’ve literally given it away for free for so long at this point that if they start charging a subscription for it nobody’s gonna go along with it. Microsoft’ll be in the same position they are now, but they’ll lose a lot of money implementing this BS.
Gotta be like 90% of people have never installed an OS because Windows was already on their PC when they bought it.
To them, its part of buying a PC. They don’t consider the OS a separate purchase.
If they make this move they’re banking on people not noticing until after they’ve bought a shiny new PC. After that most people will suffer the cost because they already own the PC and its just “easier.”
I’ve had the same Win8 Pro key that I purchased for $40 when it released 12 years ago. I’ve used it for Win10 and 11. Is this saying if I format my drive and reinstall Win11 that I won’t be able to activate using this key anymore?
If I’m not mistaken your key is linked to your motherboard as well as your Microsoft account. So I think you should be fine. I just formatted my drive yesterday and it didn’t even ask me to type it in, I skipped that step and it verified once I logged in.
Super late reply to your question, but when you add Windows and punch in the key it links to the motherboard of the PC (laptop or desktop, doesn’t matter). Once you sign in to your Microsoft account, the key and mobo serial gets stored there. If you bought a new PC and with it a new motherboard you can find your key in your account or use the one on the back of your old laptop and delink it from your old device so that you can reuse it on your new one. It moves with your account.
Of you do a standard format, you shouldn’t have to worry, but if you ever upgrade your mobo, just make sure you get a screenshot of your serial in the windows settings and make sure you are logged in to your windows account (maybe check the account settings on a browser and see if you can find your devices, not sure of this is a necessary step… but just to make sure it’s linked I guess)… then once you format, you can punch in the old serial and log in, if it pops up a warning, it may ask you to migrate the serial and delete the old device or you may have a step or two on the Microsoft website to do this, I’m a bit hazy on the details as I did this a good 4 years ago, bit it wasn’t much of a headache.
Keys are usually stored in the TPM chip and/or tied to Microsoft accounts if you use one. If you don't have an account, there's actually a limit to how often a key can activate new hardware. If there's no TPM, there's simply a limit within a certain timeframe that it can be used to activate on the same hardware.
I have around 30 windows 7 pro COAs (used to work in a pc repair shop, pulled the COAs on every dead pc that came through). Most of them are from dells, but I haven’t had an issue activating on custom pcs. If anyone wants one, let me know
Unfortunately if you want to play games with 0 hassle, Windows is still the only real option. Proton is awesome, but there are still games I want to play that either don’t work (or don’t work well), or require workarounds to get working
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