Some Windows 10 users are having problems with their Pro licenses today, as users on the company’s Community Forums and Reddit are reporting that their Windows 10 Pro systems are saying they are not activated, and telling users to install Windows 10 Home instead. Most of the reports appear to be coming from users who obtained the Windows 10 license thanks to the free upgrade path Microsoft offered back in 2015, suggesting that the issue is somehow related to it.
According to some of the reports, while the system says that users have a Windows 10 Home license, the Microsoft Store link in the settings page blocks them from attempting to buy a Pro license.
This happened to my workstation today, and it was a bit of a frightening moment – I earn my living using this machine, so seeing the big “Windows not activated” watermark certainly made me feel quite uncomfortable. Luckily, a reboot fixed it, but it does highlight just how problematic Microsoft’s activation systems can be. I begrudgingly understand that Microsoft needs some way of determining the legitimacy of Windows installations and that it needs to deter piracy, but major bugs like this really shouldn’t happen, ever.
Update: as it turns out, the reboot didn’t fix my issue at all. After running for a little while, my machine again reverted to a deactivated state. This means a watermark on the desktop interfering with things like video games, and all personalization options – colours, backgrounds, etc. – are disabled. It also seems this issue is quite widespread.
Microsoft has not provided any official statement (!), and all we have to go on is an unofficial statement on its support forums that reads:
Microsoft has just released an Emerging issue announcement about current activation issue related to Pro edition recently. This happens in Japan, Korea, American and many other countries.I am very sorry to inform you that there is a temporary issue with Microsoft’s activation server at the moment and some customers might experience this issue where Windows is displayed as not activated.
Our engineers are working tirelessly to resolve this issue and it is expected to be corrected within one to two business days.
This is clearly unacceptable. Users’ machines currently have functionality disabled, and a big watermark is interfering with everything you do on your computer. Microsoft is basically saying “yeah just deal with that for a few days”, which is entirely, utterly, and completely unacceptable.
Sadly, there’s absolutely nothing users can do about this. As always, software is special and not held to the same standards as other products, so nothing will come of this – no fines, no government investigations, no lawsuits, nothing. If this happened to a car or even a goddamn toaster, recalls would be all over the news and heads would roll. Not with software, though – because software is special, and releasing garbage software under pressure from managers is entirely normal and acceptable, and repercussions and consequences are words entirely alien to consumer software companies.
Sadly, it is what it is.
Update II: the issue is now truly fixed. Affected users can go to Settings > Update & Security > Activation and click on the troubleshooter.
Did it totally cripple your machine, or just start nagging you that you weren’t ‘legitimate’?
The latter
Why? None of my Macs, Linux, or BSD systems have background processes constantly sucking CPU cycles and taking up space in RAM for the purpose of preventing OS piracy.
Microsoft’s outdated business model for Windows isn’t sustainable in the long term. There are now too many competent alternatives from OS publishers that do not constantly try to extract more money from consumers for upgrades, updates, and new installations.
Note: If anyone wants to argue that the cost of macOS with free upgrades is built into the price of each Mac, then don’t ever argue that Macs are an example of Apple’s “overpriced hardware.”
Not even that, with Windows you don’t even own the OS – you lease it from Microsoft. No idea why people submit to this heresy.
Because a large load of professional program and other are on Windows, not on BeOS, ReactOS, Linux, MacOS, whatever, and Windows emulation on these platform is not always perfect.
Plus Windows, even though it have its downsides, is yet pretty good in the long run (99%) it isn’t fair to finger point to the 1% failures when the other operating systems have too their quirks.
To sum it up, Windows is far far far good enough for 99% of users.
Windows 7 and 8 both can be permanently activated without requiring any Internet access ever.
Windows 10 has had too many failures to be called a decent OS worthy of anyone’s attention.
No other Windows version (aside from the ones not using the WinNT kernel like Windows 95,98,Me) has ever had so many fuck ups.
If businesses had said a huge No to this Windows 10 SaaS BS, Microsoft would have maybe fixed their licensing and development model.
Alas, I’m being downvoted and you’re being upvoted which means that this website has more rabid Microsoft fanboys than rational unbiased people.
Well, I’d say I refused to take the Windows 10 route and for now everything is rather fine, staying alive under Windows 7. Until 2020. But please, don’t forget that the BSOD not only affected Windows 9x, early versions of 2000 and XP (and all of Vista) were rather unstable.
But sure, Windows 2000 SP4 and XP SP3 are rock solid. Of course, once everything get enough maturity. Why “upgrade” every now and then ? Because architectural redesign would say PR, but as a software developer, I can tell you this is completely false, it is for the money.
How do I know ? Then tell me how Windows 10 took the “slow” upgrade path and progressively adopt new technologies through bi annual updates ? Why not before ? Because there was not enough competition in that domain and it was easier to deliver a whole “new experience”.
Anyway, I bet once Windows 7, that finally had everything almost perfectly done right, a proud legacy of 2000 and XP, reach end of life, I’ll have to definitively switch to another OS if Microsoft still goes downhill since they decided to shove 10 down into everyone’s throat.
As they cannot force everyone to use the MSN network, use their Hotmail account, they had to find a way to get access to users’ data as those are the new goldmines, so forcing the switch to 10 with its rather resilient telemetry was their chosen path to success, thanks to their market dominance.
When Windows 95 was released, dial up was a luxury.
When XP was released, broadband was a luxury, and dial-up was reasonably common (but expensive and inconvenient if downloading large files)
When 7 was released, broadband was reasonably common, but still not expected.
When 8 was released, broadband was more common, and nearly universal, but cellular was still in it’s infancy. fibre broadband was a luxury.
With 10, you can almost guarantee that the PC it’s installed in has some form of high-speed internet connectivity, be it cellular, broadband, or fibre. This allows Microsoft to push large code changes over the internet, which it couldn’t before.
So why didn’t Microsoft use the Win10 update model before hand? Because the technology to allow it simply wasn’t there.
This is a non issue because the size (aka ‘Free disk space’) of said Windows versions were also corresponding to their respective generation :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Microsoft_Windows_versio…
Plus a progressive update doesn’t require to update everything as a whole and download a full fledged copy of Windows.
Don’t be stupid, please.
Correct. My original post in this thread was downvoted to -1 because I dared mention that macOS, Linux, and various BSD derivatives don’t steal CPU cycles and RAM to make sure their users aren’t pirating the OS. I expected that when I posted it, but it is sad that factually correct, logically sound posts are downvoted by people who cheer for tech companies as if they are sports teams.
Except when it downgrades your OS, or deletes files associations, or deletes your files. Other than that, sure, 99%.
/s
ReaqctOS is supposed to be a clone of Win2k3, so it should support everything 2k3/XP does. It dodges around 5the chicken-egg problem by stealing other peoples chickens.
You never own the software you use, you have a licence to it. That’s always the case, unless you actually wrote it, or purchased all rights from the original authors.
Even with the GPL, GNU Public LICENSE.
“General Public License”, actually.
“GNU GPL” isn’t a redundant acronym.
That’s factually incorrect.
There are many copyleft/public domain licenses which allow you to do whatever you please with the software you obtain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_equivalent_license
https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/
https://choosealicense.com/licenses/unlicense/
“Factually incorrect?”
When it comes to software, “ownership” is defined by owning the copyright. It doesn’t matter how permissive the license is, the ownership of the software is the owner of the copyright. Bill is right, legally the only owner of the software is the copyright owner, everyone else is a licensee.
bartgrantham,
Yes, both perspectives have merit. I think about it in terms of books: You own one copy of a book, but you don’t own the work itself. So it wouldn’t be wrong to say users own “a copy” of software, but it needs to be understood that this is different than the full ownership rights that the authors have. The first sale doctrine gives book owners a right to resell their one copy, but obviously not make new copies.
Unfortunately some companies have been rejecting first sale doctrine and using DRM and server activation to limit what we’re legally entitled to do with our one copy. For example, the law entitles me to resell a game I purchased, however a company’s activation servers may not allow it. Same thing for DRMed music, etc.
Autotest actually filed lawsuits to prevent customers from practices their first sale doctrine rights…
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/10/autocad-resale-ruling-a-…
While I’m happy to say autodesk lost that case in court, I think users are right to be concerned with attempts by companies to take away our right to do with our copy as we please. Once they sell us a copy, their continuing legal stake in that copy should be zero, IMHO. If they have a problem with that, then they should make clear that they’re merely renting copies instead of selling them in bad faith.
Edited 2018-11-08 23:25 UTC
Of course it matters.
The GPL, to use one example, explicitly grants the right to do whatever you want with the binary, including copying, modifying and selling, and the originator cannot revoke that right. Your copy is your copy. The licence is revoked, not by the originator, but by the licence, if you try to deny those rights from the people you distribute your copy to.
So while that may not be palatable to many people, the fact is the precise nature of the licence’s permissiveness does matter in regards to who owns what.
That is not quite accurate, but perhaps its academic. At the risk of furthering hair splitting…
If I own the copyright of a piece of software, I can change the license. The license doesn’t have control over how the owner of the copyright uses it. That’s the difference.
Oracle can produce a closed source enterprise version of Mysql. Percona, & Maria DB can not, they can only obey the GPL license its provided under.
The question is, whether we own a copy of our software or not.
No different from needing a drivers licence. You own your car, despite the drivers licence placing a limit on what you can do with your car. You still own it and have complete control over it.
The Oracle thing is the same, because the users of MariaDB definitely own their copy, and Oracle cannot say what MariaDB users do with their copy. Sure, the licence limits them for some things, but it also grants them a lot of things. That is different from a Microsoft or Apple licence where it does not grant you most rights, and you are not in control over it. MariaDB users own their copy and how they use it.
So details do matter. Arguing “because both have the word licence in it” that they are both equal situations is equivocation.
Free upgrade to Win10 still works… https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-win…
This isn’t a problem of installing the upgrade. It’s a problem of the upgrade suddenly deciding that it’s no longer activated.
Ehh, I quoted the words to which I replied, which weren’t about “the upgrade suddenly deciding that it’s no longer activated” but clearly how “alternatives” give free upgrades/updates while Windows / MS business model supposedly (mistakenly) doesn’t…
The hardware is overpriced and the OS is part of the deal – and that argument is logical and reasonable.
You are also “forgetting” buyers of Windows 7+ get free Windows 10 updates. The model used by Apple but without being locked to expensive hardware.
Plus OS updates are paying.
Which OS Updates are ‘paying’?
Care to clarify what you meant by this?
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/D6377Z/A/os-x-mountain-lion ?
You’re forgetting that “the model used by Apple” doesn’t have “activation servers” and processes that call home, hobbling your computer if they suspect the OS is pirated. Nor is Apple’s model a one-time response for a series of horrible operating system updates that soured consumers. As they wrote on The Verge, the Windows 10 upgrade is to help in “erasing the painful memories of Windows 8.”
Suggesting that Microsoft has adopted “[t]he model used by Apple,” where the OS upgrades are free, is laughable. I can take any currently supported Mac with any OS (OS-X/macOS, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc.), or even a a wiped hard drive, and install a copy of the current macOS straight from Apple at no cost. No product keys. No activation servers.
I can hold down Command-Option/Alt-R while pressing the Power button, and my Mac’s firmware will perform an “Internet Recovery” in which it retrieves a copy of the OS from Apple and installs it. What keys do you hold down on a Windows-compatible PC to get it to download a copy of the OS and install it?
You can do the same on virtually any modern OEM Windows machine, too. License key is stored in the machine’s ROM these days.
This is what I mean when I say die-hard Apple people need to leave their bubble once in a while – they have literally no idea what’s going on outside of it, and their opinions are usually based on knowledge from like 1998 or 2002.
Today I saw the watermark on my laptop and I just wondered WTF happened… Thanks for the heads-up!
That laptop already has dual boot, maybe I’ll just go full Linux…
First Generations of UEFI had BIOS workarounds. And Licences installed through those workarounds.
Maybe not accident. Maybe MS actually not knowing all bottoms (of stack).
Edited 2018-11-08 20:51 UTC
Many people do hold software to the same standards as other products but they do not use Windows.
Edited 2018-11-08 21:07 UTC
Except that there are quite a few people, especially some of the biggest customers of MS, that really don’t have a practical choice because it would cost them exponentially more money to switch. In fact, that’s a large part of why it’s unacceptable, people can’t realistically go to another platform.
And yet those same people manage to afford the upgrades to newer versions of Windows and Office every few years. Budgeting isn’t typically the problem.
No, I’d argue it really is, it’s just not the direct monetary impact that’s the issue. The important resource here isn’t money so much as time, or alternatively, lost productivity.
Retraining people for new versions of the same software is a serious pain in the arse and quite often takes a ridiculous amount of time. Now imagine retraining people to use different software, for every piece of software they use, and you’ll start to see why this is an issue.
The purely monetary cost of getting new versions of Windows is nothing compared to the cost of the lost productivity from having to retrain people.
So basically they will accept it because it would cost them much more money to reject it than it would cost them to accept it. That agrees with what I said instead of being an exception to it.
It’s nothing to do with deterring piracy, pirate versions have this denial-of-service code removed and actually work better.
As usual, the pirates enjoy a better user experience than the legitimate users…
I don’t see what’s clearly and utterly unacceptable with the company clearly stating that they intend to fix it within one or two business days. Windows Activation watermarks do look janky but it really doesn’t have a major impact on machine usability — beyond Personalization issues (which really don’t matter if it’s a business machine).
I understand that it’s frustrating that Microsoft isn’t a magical entity that can just fix any problem with a flick of a wrist and some pixie dust, but one or two days is pretty dang fast response time for a widespread issue that requires investigation.
Unless otherwise proven, they’re not doing this maliciously and they’re really *not* ignoring the issue. Their response is perfectly acceptable to me. Maybe I’ve misunderstood Thom’s statement, or something else, though.
Hypothetical situation based on real world use of technology:
In a NOC that monitors production normal, production critical, and various non-production environments the main displays/desktops are color coded for specific environments. Admins remote desktop to the box they are working on.
Each color coded theme tells at a glance what environment the admin is manipulating.
If those machines suddenly revert to ‘unactivated’ state then it becomes much more likely for mistakes to happen due to being in the wrong environment.
Are there other ways to be sure and protect against things like that? Yes, of course. That’s why hopefully multi-layered approaches are used. It’s still a case where this kind of nonsense from Microsoft can cause significant damage/accidents. It’s not a non-issue.
I’m not convinced, and that’s a convoluted solution. If a text overlay is enough to break a system it wasn’t a reasonable system to begin with. Microsoft already does a lot in the way of ensuring their customers have ample backward compatibility.
Imagine you’ve got to give some big presentation to a bunch of non-technical people (not an unusual situation in many business or academic settings).
That watermark is going to make you look bad, even if it’s just as much as you having to explain to them (and waste everybody’s time) that it’s really just an issue with Microsoft’s servers.
Yes, the response from Microsoft is reasonable, though the ‘business days’ part is interesting (do they not consider this important enough to have people working on it constantly until it’s fixed?). The fact that their system is designed in a way that this can even happen is a bit ridiculous though. Is it really necessary to check the licensing if something hasn’t happened on the system that would cause the licensing state to change?
What’s unacceptable is the failure of a piece of code that serves the vendor at the expense of the user. Having this in there provides absolutely no benefit to the user whatsoever, and can (as in this case) disrupt the user.
Removing this code would be an improvement for every single customer.
What defeatest drivel. Hmm, when was the last time my linux system complained about activation, oh or my Mac, oh or my bsd machine. Quit using MS crap and you will have done something. Once while traveling globally, I wasn’t able to access the internet for a multi-week period. After Office stopped working entirely because it couldn’t phone home to MS, I dropped MS as a serious platform for serious work. Yeah, you may be powerless, but it’s in your own mind. Move on.
What happens to PCs with no Internet access and, hence, no access to “Microsoft’s activation server”?
Hopefully Microsoft fires all Windows developers hired since 2012. They need to be publicly shamed and blacklisted so they don’t run off and ruin any other company either.
All Microsoft OS initiatives have failed since Windows 8. Every single one. The visions they’ve been chasing have failed and the people that implemented them are failures and suck at life.
The only redeeming quality Windows 10 possesses is that it’s based off of Windows 7 and can run real win32 desktop applications, and even that inertia is quickly losing steam.
We’ll continue seeing problems like this as Windows and the online infrastructure powering activation and updates continues to bitrot at the hands of massively unqualified interns.
hot take from guy who clearly don’t understand how product decisions are are.
Yeah, developers have nothing to do with this shit show – senior managers/marketing guys/ceo/board of directors are the ones to blame.
Natya could have easily ask to remove this ugly UWP UI in Windows 10 and revert to Windows 7 UI but he cannot admit the failure.
Funny how this is totally unacceptable, while force installing updates and force rebooting the users computers is not.
OEM Windows 10 home (laptop). I bought a Win10 pro upgrade from the store. Got the watermark yesterday. A few days ago I installed a windows 10 insider update to fix the zip file extraction error in 1809, so my first thought was it had something to do with that.
My MS account had a record of the purchase, but no indication of a serial number or anything of the sort. Retrieving it with nirsoft’s key thing showed it was just the generic win10 pro license. I don’t actually have a serial, I have a digital license, and yesterday showed what those are worth.
Was on hold for an hour before someone told me the problem was on their end and it was affecting millions. I thanked him, told him I wouldn’t take any more of his time and wished him luck. It’s activated again, but now it’s obvious how tenuous that is.
You can use ubuntu, it’s better
Narrator: it isn’t.
Don’t be that guy.