Windows 10 Pro license $5.99

[jesse g]

Windows 11 Pro for 10.55...

C'MON  ?

[jesse g]

I just built a new computer and I got my Windows 10 Pro key from the website, https://pcdeal.tv/Win10Pro - for $21.87 . I saw a YouTube channel explaining why the license keys were so cheap. They explained to me, the keys was comng from China and other countries where the keys were not being used and if you own a license key for any Mocrosoft OS install from 2007 and up, the key will install Windows 10 and Microsoft doens't care where the keys are activated, as long as the key used once and is authentic.   The key I bought activated Windows 10 and I was able to update the PC to Windows 11 Pro without  any problems.

I am going back to get MS office 2021. ?

Edited February 7, 2023 by jesse g

[Zo]

I said to my son «  hey in case you need a windows pro key , i can have it for 5 bucks just tell me «  

he answered : «  five buks , that s exoensive i can have those for 1 ... » 

don t know if i need to be glad or worried lol ? 

[Fleer]

8 minutes ago, Zo said:

I said to my son «  hey in case you need a windows pro key , i can have it for 5 bucks just tell me «  

he answered : «  five buks , that s exoensive i can have those for 1 ... » 

don t know if i need to be glad or worried lol ? 

We’re done, Zo. 

[fret_man]

19 hours ago, jesse g said:

<snip>

I am going back to get MS office 2021. ?

Be careful. My cheap Office Pro 2021 key expired after 1 yr. Not sure what happened but all my Office products now need to be reactivated. Gonna uninstall-reinstall to see if I can reset it.

[jesse g]

1 hour ago, fret_man said:

Be careful. My cheap Office Pro 2021 key expired after 1 yr. Not sure what happened but all my Office products now need to be reactivated. Gonna uninstall-reinstall to see if I can reset it.

?   Who is fret_man getting his license keys from???

[jesse g]

12 hours ago, Zo said:

I said to my son «  hey in case you need a windows pro key , i can have it for 5 bucks just tell me «  

he answered : «  five buks , that s exoensive i can have those for 1 ... » 

don t know if i need to be glad or worried lol ? 

Zo,

For a buck, I'll call your son to get several hundred and resell them for $10.00 each.   ???

[Zo]

6 minutes ago, jesse g said:

Zo,

For a buck, I'll call your son to get several hundred and resell them for $10.00 each.   ???

Why son , i ll do it lol that s a lot of plugin ahahha ....

[fret_man]

23 hours ago, jesse g said:

?   Who is fret_man getting his license keys from???

I got mine from Gamers Outlet. But today I uninstalled the old Office and re-installed it with my bought cheap key and it now works again. I think it was confused between what I bought myself and what I got thru work. I recently retired and lost all connections to my employment benefits, including their Office products. That's when things started getting confused. But all is good now.

[NOLAGuy]

I ordered the $5.99 Win10 Pro upgrade. Got the license key, followerd @Starship Krupa upgrade guidance, including doing a system restore before stating the upgrade.

Win10 Activation screen accepted the new license key and I started the upgrade. Seemed to all go smoothly, but somewhere around the middle of the upgrde process I got a crash and  a message that the upgrade ran into a problem and the changes made were being reversed. So about 15 min later, I was back to my normal Win10 environment. I checked the Blue Screen utility and the system crash was there but no simple clue as to the nature of the problem.

So I'll hold on to the upgrade key and since I am considering a newer PC, I would expect it can be used on that Win10 standard version.

Bottom line... The upgrade key was accepted by Microsoft and the upgrade program ran for about 15 min before the crash with the status  messages indicating all was going well. So I feel it's a valid purchase.

[Starship Krupa]

54 minutes ago, NOLAGuy said:

since I am considering a newer PC, I would expect it can be used on that Win10 standard version.

Since it looks like you didn't get as far as having a fully working upgraded 10 Pro system, you should be able to use the key to license it on a new system. If Microsoft's server think's you already used the key, it is possible to phone them up and have them fix it.

Glad it worked! I don't know how they're doing it so cheaply. Don't much care either, as long as Microsoft accepts the keys.

[Doug Steinschneider]

On 1/15/2023 at 3:40 PM, abacab said:

I once had to re-activate my Windows 10 after a motherboard upgrade when Windows detected major new hardware. I called in to MS and the tech told me to enter my old Windows 7 code to activate it (it had been a Win 7 Pro to Win 10 Pro upgrade). That worked and all is good ever since!

On the subject of Microsoft looking the other way and being vague about Win10 licensing. Every Windows 7 machine can be upgraded to it's equivalent version in Windows 10 by running the Windows Upgrade Assistant. If you do a clean install as abacab mentions you can put the Windows 7 code in and it always activates. I think there was an "upgrade by date" back in the Win10 roll out period but they never actually implemented a cut off. 

[Doug Steinschneider]

On 2/7/2023 at 10:31 AM, fret_man said:

Be careful. My cheap Office Pro 2021 key expired after 1 yr. Not sure what happened but all my Office products now need to be reactivated. Gonna uninstall-reinstall to see if I can reset it.

Office has been a different story. The key you see on the card isn't the actual office product key. You can only get that by logging on the account they force you to make and go into licenses and click a button that says show Office license key. 

I got so tired of dealing with Office licensing that I convince people to do the family plan. Five different Microsoft accounts (need separate email for each) can install it on 5 computers each. It's also easy to remove an older computer to make room for a new one. It's $100/year but that's $20/year/user which as long as you have 5 users is very reasonable and then you're always in the latest version (which has its own set of issues )

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, Doug Steinschneider said:

I got so tired of dealing with Office licensing that I convince people to do the family plan.

I go for Google Docs or LibreOffice. Haven't touched Microsoft Office in about 20 years.

[kitekrazy]

On 1/16/2023 at 5:29 PM, jesse g said:

Windows 11 Pro for 10.55...

C'MON  ?

I'd pay for it if they removed the TMP.

[abacab]

2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I go for Google Docs or LibreOffice.

LibreOffice has come a long way! I do like MS Excel, and occasionally have to look up help when I'm using Libre Calc, but it's good enough for home use!

I only use MS Office if my employer is paying for it.

Edited February 12, 2023 by abacab

[PavlovsCat]

On 1/15/2023 at 4:01 PM, Starship Krupa said:

I'm a Dell man when it comes to pre-built.

Same and I will share the reason why. On 9/11, I was a strategy director for one of the companies with the highest number of employee deaths in the World Trade Center. I was alone in a room with our CEO just days after that day with a very long silence and he shared how Michael Dell had called him and offered to add another shift and stop all normal production and focus it exclusively on making laptops for our surviving WTC employees. Michael never tried to get publicity for doing that.  Having advised, worked with and on partnerships and execs with some very well known brands (Apple, Google, Nike, etc), Michael Dell's going out of his way just out of decency is something I will always remember. Plus I don't have an NDA on that one and I don't think Michael would mind that story getting out.  And that's the end of positive stories about billionaires from me! Hahaha. 
 

Edited February 12, 2023 by PavlovsCat

[Doug Steinschneider]

When I decided to stop selling hardware years ago, I settled on Dell for servers, desktop, laptops and sometimes network components.  Margins were so low I made just much by charging for time spent specifying and executing purchases. One way I've saved clients a boatload of money is buying desktops and laptops from Dell Financial Services (now branded Dell Refurbished). I've had more new computers fail than the ones from DFS. If you go for cosmetic grade A they often appear to have sat unused on a shelf somewhere. Until the recent 12th and 13th generation Intel chips there wasn't much of a performance hit going for older CPU's. 

[abacab]

Another +1 for Dell from me! ?

Don't have any experience with Dell servers or desktops, but the business grade Latitude laptops are hard to beat for durability and serviceability. I build my own desktops for DAW use, so this comment is about using a laptop for everyday use or as a mobile office.

Latitudes were standard issue for mobile and remote workers at the company I worked for. So the last time that I needed to replace a personal laptop, I went with a refurb Dell Latitude, and couldn't be more satisfied. They are built to last, and the user manual has a complete teardown and rebuild guide, so anything such as screen, keyboard, battery, memory, drives, Wi-Fi cards, etc. can be replaced by the user without a lot of hassle.

With the refurbs, you can usually find a unit that has been refreshed with the latest OS, and is certainly more budget friendly than new, if you are willing to go with an older model without the latest bells and whistles. My Latitude came with a fresh Windows 10 Professional pre-installed on a HDD. Saved a few bucks by cloning that drive onto a spare SSD that I pulled from a DIY desktop upgrade. Easy swap in a few minutes, and I didn't have to pay more for a refurb that already had a SSD installed!

Deal! Or dude, you got a Dell! ?

[Starship Krupa]

Dell business laptops, for at least the past 7 years or more, come with a Windows Pro license baked into their motherboards. No need to buy keys or anything like that. I suspect that it's the same with other big laptop manufacturers. Might be the same with their towers.

I recently upgraded from an incredibly stalwart Latitude E6410 that someone gave me after it was retired from service at their company. I think it was manufactured in 2011, so it was already 5 years old when I got it. It came with an i5, which I eventually upgraded to an i7. Slower base clock, but DAW's and NLE's love extra cores. It's still fine for that use, but it's heavy, can only accept 8G of RAM and the i7 gives it a battery life of about 1.5 hours on a fresh battery. I liked having the separate nVidia GPU chip, though. Last year plug-in manufacturers started really using DirectX 12, so I was running into ones that wouldn't work, like Kontakt Player 7 and MODO Drum.

The latest one is a Latitude 7480, another corporate retiree that I found on CL for $50. It had no hard drive and the battery was shot, but $70 later, it has a 1T Silicon Power (my preferred brand for SSD's and RAM) and a brand new battery. It came with 16G of RAM. Lighter, slimmer, and has a full-featured Thunderbolt port (I have fallen in love with Thunderbolt as a result). Only 2/4 cores, but since it's several generations newer, still better performance (Cakewalk really liked turning off plug-in load balancing for some reason). The screen is smaller than I would like, but you can't beat the price.

Cautions about Dell business laptops for audio: Dells in general are notoriously locked down, as befits their intended use as bombproof business boxes. So no overclocking, although with enough BIOS finesse and Windows Fu you can get the CPU into the Turbo zone and pretty much keep it there when plugged in and doing CPU intensive work. Also, and this is crucial for the kind of work we do, they are known for coming back with funky results from LatencyMon. Specifically, the driver ACPI.SYS is an interrupt hog. Look up "Dell laptop latency" and you'll see. I found a trick to at least get LatencyMon to sign off on the 7480, which is in the plugged in high performance power plan, set Maximum and Minimum CPU to 99%. Somehow that lets ACPI.SYS relax a little. I don't really understand why, but it worked.

Regarding Dell towers, the locked down BIOS is also a thing, but with BIOS and power plan finesse I managed to nail the 3.4GHz i7-3770 in my Optiplex to 3.87GHz and it never wavers from that. As with all Dells, the case is tank-like. I did replace the power supply with a 500W to accommodate my AMD and nVidia GPU's. Also, and this may be important for DAW use, they offer nothing in the way of fan tuning and control, although I managed to get mine very quiet with some fan replacement. Noctua and BeQuiet fans are $10-12.

You can now get an Optiplex with an i7-6770 and 16G of RAM in it for just a little over $200 as a Dell Refurbish on Amazon, probably due to the Windows 11 incompatibility windfall. Throw an nVidia 1060 or 1030 in one of those and it will handle anything you throw at it short of maybe the latest FPS games, although I haven't tried any (not my thing). On my i7-6770 system (home built) my indie adventure/puzzle games look beautiful and run like bandits. For a huge orchestral sample library user, 32G of RAM might be better, but for my use, I was doing okay with the 8G in my old laptop.

There are some who seem to look down on acquiring any computer system with a CPU older than gen 11, but the only thing I can think of that that kind of CPU power is needed for is hardcore gaming. I'd ask anyone with a gen 11 CPU: what can't I do on my i7-6770 except meet the requirements for Windows 11? If there is anything, I've yet to find it.