Back in the days of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, a Windows installation never needed any activation. Microsoft didn’t care; you could use your 22 floppy disks of Windows 95 as many times as you wished. Perhaps the reason was that the internet was not as ubiquitous as it is today to police the authenticity of a Windows installation.
These days, most of the Windows computers come with the operating system software pre-installed. A license key is embedded. The hard drive is usually partitioned to allow the creation of a self-recovery scheme.
When your computer crashes, the computer prompts you to tap a key and behold your machine gets restored to factory settings. The process allows you to backup your data and restores your ownership of the copy of Windows.
Well and good; the problem arises when the hard drive with the restore partition becomes unreadable and unrecoverable. At that point you need to make a call to Microsoft and explain your predicament. The company will be kind enough to email you the license key. You then can buy a replacement hard drive, use a Windows media and restore your operating system.
Now, do I really have to toil that much to retrieve a license key that legally belongs to me? Symantec has a beautiful way that achieves the same results. Once you buy a single license Norton Antivirus, the company allows you to reinstall it two more times after the initial installation using the same key.
Symantec does not punish if you choose to conspire with the devils within you and use the single license on three machines. The company only expects you to pray so hard that nothing happens to any of those three computers that would require reinstallation of the Norton Antivirus. In the event that happens, you would have to return to the shop and buy another copy.
Microsoft has announced that from now on, the company will use a more convenient way for Windows activation. You may have noticed that Windows 8 and Windows 10 has an option that lets you login using a Microsoft Account. The company has now put a provision in Windows 10 that ties the Windows license to your Microsoft Account.
This makes life very simple; should you need to replace the hard drive of your Windows device, Windows 10 will only need you to supply your Windows Account and Microsoft servers will look for your license and give it back to you.
But why should anybody ever bother about Windows Activation? If you do not activate Windows; meaning that you never bought the Windows software, Microsoft only intimidates you with occasional pop-up messages that your Windows is not genuine. This has gone on for the last 15 years. Doesn’t Microsoft know that morality is too complex to be criminalized?
So, where are we? Back to where we started; free Windows 3.1.
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