Free Laptops! (Now I have your attention....) Licencing Issues

[Warwick_Tech]

Hi all,

 

I've kindly been donated a bunch of laptops from a local business to help with the current covid pandemic.

 

Their DPO has (quite rightly) removed the HDD's so I need to provide these, however I am reluctant to licence our MAK/KMS keys against these as they will likely never be seen again.

 

I have a ticket open with MS to try and find a solution, but other than buying OEM machines or the government issued ones how is everyone else dealing with licencing these machines we are likely to never see again? I would have nightmares about losing our licences and having to go through that process again...

[Rob_D]

If you license them to your on-site KMS server they'd have to connect it to your network every 180 days to reactivate otherwise license automatically revokes.

 

Alternatively, if you have office 365 students can license their device by linking it to their 365 account. They leave, you disable the account the device is unusable without a factory reset which is going to prompt for a new license.

[mavhc]

They're laptops, they came with a windows licence, just install windows 10 home/pro, whatever it came with originally

[caffrey]

Yep BIOS should hold the key - it's a digital licence. You can check with a key retriever to see if there is one

[Chris_Cook]

Or load Neverware on them - make them chromebooks.

[Rob_D]

Yep BIOS should hold the key - it's a digital licence. You can check with a key retriever to see if there is one

I thought that was only a thing with newer devices? (I assume as these are donated they're going to be somewhat vintage)

[caffrey]

I've just fixed up a 5 year old PC that had a digital licence - it's usually win 8 \ 10 machines that have them

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Or load Neverware on them - make them chromebooks.

 

I would go this route, I did first lockdown with a bunch of old old laptops

[mavhc]

They key doesn't need to be in the bios, it can be on microsoft's servers, just install windows pro and see if it auto activates, and if not windows home

[Warwick_Tech]

They key doesn't need to be in the bios, it can be on microsoft's servers, just install windows pro and see if it auto activates, and if not windows home

 

Does that really work? I know they stopped using stickers after it was obviously a massive security hole.

 

How would you get a key from the bios?

[caffrey]

The key from the bios is automagic, the PC I did said it failed so I went through activation troubleshooting where it picked up the key in the bios and activated itself

 

PC was a cheap hp g2.5 bought off fleabay with no os and no sticker on the case - it just needed windows 10 pro

 

There are tools out there to expose the key from the bios

[mavhc]

wmic path softwarelicensingservice get OA3xOriginalProductKey

 

or https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

 

But that's Win8 things, not Win10 really. Now you just try and activate and see if it works, the licence is on MS's end.

 

Your computer's serial number etc is sent, and if it's already in the database, you're activated

[jmak]

In the past, if you've run out of MAKs MS have issued more to your VLSC.

 

I have been told that part of the electronic/BIOS key is a "fingerprint" of the device which can be broken by changing a major component. In that case you can call them and tell them what happened (failed MB or HDD etc) and they will reactivate. Not sure how they'd cope of you ring up with a set of 300!

 

But I've replaced HDDs a few times and they've just worked.

[kennysarmy]

Or load Neverware on them - make them chromebooks.

 

Is that free?

[LeMarchand]

Is that free?

 

The Home Edition is, if they don't need managing. Though (in common with many such distros) 32 bit machines are no longer supported.

[FN-GM]

I thought that was only a thing with newer devices? (I assume as these are donated they're going to be somewhat vintage)

 

Its been like that since Windows 8. That was back in 2012.