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It's 2013, and Windows Activation Is Still Frustrating
Deathspawner writes "There's little that's more frustrating than being a legal customer and getting screwed over by the company you're supporting. If there's a perfect example of this, it's with Microsoft's OS and its millions of customers that have had to ring its tech support lines for activation help. Recently, a Techgage writer got bit by an issue with Windows 8 — caused by Microsoft itself — and wasn't even able to call to fix it. Microsoft has two problems to solve here: it needs online chat support (like most large companies in 2013) and it definitely needs an activation system that doesn't make things difficult for its legal customers on a too-regular basis."
As a university student, my uni grants access to MS products like Windows, Visual Studio etc. It really was a matter of entering a serial and that was all that had to be done. I take it off the shelf windows activates more obtusely?
If memory serves, Windows phones home some data about the platform it finds itself on when it is activated(I don't know if it is particularly identifiable, or just a hash of whatever seems likely to be system specific, or somewhere in between), and some versions can be very unhappy if they come to the conclusion that they've previously been activated on different hardware. Enough time on the phone will get you a nice guy in India who will probably be able to fix it for you; but it definitely can happen.
Ironically Activation on Microsoft platform pushed me to Linux
Windows 8 is not available to me from Microsoft only an upgrade I cannot use. From Microsoft http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/buy?ocid=GA8_O_WOL_Hero_ShopHP_FPP_Null the prices are $155 for a Windows 8 Upgrade or $295 for Windows 8 Pro. I could not find a version of retail Windows 8 anywhere. What is true for you is not true for me.
Retail Windows OS can be re-installed up to three times before you need to manually activate the product.
As I understand it, the activation process creates a system profile "hash", and ties it to the product key. When your system changes in a significant way (MB, CPU or NIC) it can trigger a re-activation.
People that rebuiild their systems frequently are familiar with this problem.
Ken
Don't activate THEN install 10 device drivers.
You blame the user for that and not Microsoft? The hardware has the same PCI/USB vendor and device ID's as before the drivers were installed. Those are detected just fine without drivers. If this really does cause problems, then the real problem is Microsoft basing their hardware configuration hash on anything relating to software and not hardware.