Posted on 11/11/2018 5:18:37 PM PST by steveo
No. Too much trouble. We ride them until they surrender.
Make sure you are doing Local Profiles. Windows set mine up as Roaming and it screws everything up.
Surprisingly, the vendor got back to me within a couple of hours asking if I had upgraded the machine or done something else that might have affected the license. So it is possible that they might send another key. If they were just selling illegitimate keys found by a key finder utility, I am not sure why they would not have just emailed another already.
I have been told that you can use a BIOS key extraction utility to get a Windows 7 OEM license to activate on a VMware virtual machine. I have done this on physical hardware after doing a clean installs using standard Windows 7 installation discs made from images downloaded from Microsoft. I believe that this is more difficult using Hyper-V. I assume that there are others here more knowledgeable than I on this topic.
“Hi,
May we kindly ask you let us know if you have made a clean install using our downloader or did you activated a priorly installed Windows 7 Pro. If the latter is the case we would highly recommend checking the integrity of your system files. Here are the steps for a scan and reactivation:
1) make sure that you've an active internet connection
2) check date and time and correct if necessary
3) restart computer
4) start command prompt as an administrator
5) type sfc /scannow to scan the integrity of system files
6) restart the computer
7) start command prompt as an administrator
8) type slmgr /rearm to reset the expiry (important for reactivation)
9) restart the computer
10) start command prompt as an administrator
11) type slmgr /upk and press enter (this will uninstall the installed activation key from your system)
12) type slui 3 and press enter. A window will open, please enter your purchased activation key and confirm it. This will start the activation
13) type slmgr /xpr to see the activation status
If this should fail, please let us know with the error message
Please note that we do not constantly monitor our inbox. Therefore it may take up to 24 hours to get a response from us.
Kind regards
CHEAPERCODES”
I thought they were wasting my time especially after I did step 12 and it didn't work the first time. I wasn't able to cut and paste the number and I had entered one character wrong. I never had to wait more than 2 hours for a response even though I contacted them in the middle of the night.
This is their current eBay ad:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Windows-7-Professional-32-64-bit-Activation-Key/323416369252
I have no affiliation with them what-so-ever other than being a satisfied customer once again. There eBay ad says they are based in Germany. The email with the product activation key that they send you comes with a link to the installation DVD ISO file. But I used the media that I already had that came direct from Microsoft.
So my luck with Microsoft product activation keys purchased on eBay remains untarnished.
Thanks for all the info. I’m certain others will find your information useful as well. Should I need additional licenses, I’ll check the Ebay vendors first! :)
I am sure that there are lots of disreputable eBay and Amazon vendors. Somehow, I seem to have been lucky so far. I have been using eBay for approximately 20 years and was ripped off for about $20 just once. So I am fairly good at picking reputable sellers. But I can only speak of the actual experiences that I have had. I was as skeptical as anyone here when I purchased my first product activation key from eBay, and totally expected it to be some type of scam. Maybe they still are, but I do not know what it is. Should all the licenses from old computers just be lost when they are sold? That might be the way that they are written... I have never tried to wade through all the legaleez. Maybe someone here can tell us.
There used to be all sorts of key generators available which provided keys for Windows XP that lasted for a long while. That got tightened up pretty well when Windows 7 came along. But then it was found that the OEM keys license keys could be copied with a utility and then reinstalled into a clean install to get rid of all the crapware that comes with new computers these days. But it is very helpful to have a legitimate licenses that can be used in virtual machines especially with Windows 10 since it “calls home” basically every time the OS is connected to the internet.
I have heard that many surplus Windows 10 licenses come from creative souls who “recycled” thousands of corporate computers and then did the free upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I do not know if this is accurate or not.
I bought a few Win 10 keys from ebay vendors in UK. About $4 each. They have all worked so far. My speculation is that Microsoft gave out Win 10 keys in UK (Europe too) like candy in order to keep/expand Windows and Microsoft market share. That Apple has them running scared.
Go to ebay UK to look and pick a vendor with a good track record. Obviously the Win 10 key comes via email and you use it with Win 10 downloaded direct from Microsoft.
Ever see the thousands and thousands of reworked corporate desktop computers? Recycled on ebay. There are businesses with tens of thousands of ebay sales.
You might typically see a Dell Optiplex that has Intel 4th generation i3, i5, i7. Beefed up ram to 8 or 16 gigabytes. A replaced hard drive. Even SSDs if you look. And Windows 10. The Dells originally came with Windows 7. Those 4th gen i5 CPUs are very strong and great for Win 10.
Selling for $150-$200-$225 or so. My thought is that Microsoft is selling them Windows 10 licenses very cheap, like $10 each. Or allowing enabling Win 7 to Win 10 upgrades at this late date.
I am not sure of the explanation for these cheap Microsoft licenses from Europe. But I suspect that yours is likely pretty close. I am not sure how it is that Microsoft would allow some of these sellers to sell them year after year and accumulate thousands of positive feedback if it were complete piracy or fraud. I am sure that there have been fly by night operators on eBay who have taken advantage of people, but eBay’s feedback system tends to identify them out fairly effectively at least for experienced customers.
According to the EPA 416,000 mobile devices and 142,000 computers are discarded every day in the United States alone. Because there are even more people living in Europe than we have here, I would assume that their figures are even higher. So that comes to over 100 million computers a year. If even a small percentage have licenses that can be transferred during the recycling process that would be more than enough to supply the relatively small amount compared to this figure that are sold on eBay. It is likely that European nations limit Microsoft’s ability to write their licenses in ways that prevent this from being done which would help to explain why nearly all the vendors doing this are from Europe.
I have purchased quite a few laptops and desktops and spare parts for myself and others over the years. I replaced the motherboard on one of my previous laptops several times. It had a socketed CPU and GPU which allowed me to upgrade them when the price became reasonable, but this caused an increase in internal temperatures which put a strain on some of the other surface mounted components when doing processor intensive tasks such as video editing. Fortunately, the same motherboard was used in several of the manufacturer’s other laptop models so there was an abundant supply of recycled pieces. I was very happy that eBay gave me a source of reasonably priced recycled components.
There are a large percentage of us who sometimes assume we have been ripped off when actually we have just made some small mistake which actually caused our difficulties. If the organization that I purchased my Windows 7 pro license I thought had gone bad hadn’t gotten back to me and provided good technical support I would have just assumed that I had been scammed. The deal seemed to good to be true so I still do not have a high level of confidence in any of the cheap licenses that I have purchased. But it turned out that I had just screwed it up by not deleting the checkpoint in my virtual machine that was made before I had completed the licensing verification process with Microsoft.
But I also sometimes wonder what percentage of the horror stories spread about people getting ripped off on recycled computers, components and software licenses are started by people working for product and software manufacturers.
Clonezilla. good you have Linux experience. you can clone the whole disk or clone a partition. make a partition on the new machine large enough to clone the win 7.dual booting Linux works best with 2 hard disks. maybe if your old HD with win 7 is compatible with your new system you can take that drive and make it a dedicated Linux drive.
it’s also possible to be able to boot win 7 or win 10 with lilo or grub as long as the loader is on the first hard disk.
https://clonezilla.org/
I haven’t tried it yet. I was trying to d/l and copy all of my important stuff. I will be bummed, but it is was it is, I guess/ :(
I got it for $599 so I am OK with it. I am sure it will be fine for me.
They have another 17.3 that will be $499 next week.
Tell me more!
Just migrated from a MacBook to aPC from Costco. Windows 10 driving me mad!
Would love to dump this asinine desktop. Everything I want to do is waaaay to complicated or hidden somewhere.
That is what we paid as well. We have been very happy with both of ours. I was in Costco the other day and they had some of their other laptops on sale, but we really like the 17” touch screens. Since these have been out for nearly a year, I expect them to go on final clearance very soon. I probably will pick up a couple for my parents at that time.
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