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Windows IT

You Can No Longer Activate New Windows 11 Builds With Windows 7 or 8 Keys (neowin.net) 84

Posted by msmash from the PSA dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: In December 2022, we published a short PSA, reminding users they could still activate Windows 11 and 10 with valid Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 keys. This practice dates back to 2015 when Microsoft launched Windows 10 with a one-year free upgrade window. Besides letting Windows 7/8 users upgrade for free to Windows 10, Microsoft allowed activating its newest OS using keys from the previous releases.

Upgrade from Windows 7 and 8 to Windows is no longer possible, and it now seems that Microsoft is removing the loophole to prevent users from activating Windows 11 with old Windows license keys. As spotted by Deskmodder, Microsoft published a message on the Device Partner Center, notifying customers that the installation path to obtain free upgrades from Windows 7 and 8 to more recent Windows versions is no longer available. What it means is that you can no longer update from Windows 7/8/8.1 to Windows 10 or 11.
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You Can No Longer Activate New Windows 11 Builds With Windows 7 or 8 Keys More

You Can No Longer Activate New Windows 11 Builds With Windows 7 or 8 Keys

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  • Whats the point (Score:3)

    by ZERO1ZERO ( 948669 ) on Friday September 29, 2023 @12:24PM (#63887143)
    Whats the point of activating windows anyway? Why not just make it so it doesnt need activating and cut out all this middleman key bullshit what difference does it make.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Scoth ( 879800 )

      They can mostly ignore the hobbyist pirate that installs a copy or two on their gaming machines with hacked activations because they're not much revenue anyway. Running Windows un-activated these days is a fairly mild inconvenience too if you aren't big on customized colors and stuff, so that's not a huge deal either.

      But, Microsoft can still make decent money on OEM licensing agreements as well as business/volume sales with accountability there should a business choose to not license their stuff. They proba

      • Right, and these business are upgrading using win7 lic keys?

      • At a small business level (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Cward ( 10374574 ) on Friday September 29, 2023 @12:50PM (#63887247)
        If a small business engages with Microsoft at any stage where a Windows install can be detected, they will then randomly approach you to perform a SAM audit, which consists of IT filling out an Excel spreadsheet full of info. If one has no legal business relationship with Microsoft and just straight up pirates everything without using any accounts on their cloud systems, they cannot do a thing about it, as they have no legitimate means to make contact to ask for information.

        Of course, that does leave one open to blackmail risks from disgruntled employees, so is it really worth it?

        • If a small business engages with Microsoft at any stage where a Windows install can be detected, they will then randomly approach you to perform a SAM audit, which consists of IT filling out an Excel spreadsheet full of info. If one has no legal business relationship with Microsoft and just straight up pirates everything without using any accounts on their cloud systems, they cannot do a thing about it, as they have no legitimate means to make contact to ask for information.
          Of course, that does leave one open to blackmail risks from disgruntled employees, so is it really worth it?

          I doubt many small business users are upgrading their operating systems in-house, and from old OS keys. Most businesses use whatever came with their computers, and then "upgrade" only when they replace their PC's.

        • For those disgruntled employees reading this, just fill out this convenient form!

          https://www.siia.net/software/ [siia.net]

      • They can mostly ignore the hobbyist pirate that installs a copy or two on their gaming machines with hacked activations because they're not much revenue anyway. Running Windows un-activated these days is a fairly mild inconvenience too if you aren't big on customized colors and stuff, so that's not a huge deal either.

        Why would you need to use a pirated, un-activated copy when you can simply go to Google shopping and buy a key for less than 12 bucks? There seems to be loads of resellers there violating their Microsoft agreements, yet Microsoft never shuts them down ( I suspect they'd rather allow this than take a chance on truly mass piracy). It's a pain in the ass to use phone activation on some of them, but but it saves you over a hundred bucks per install, and you've got a "valid" Windows install accepted by Microsoft

        • Exactly so what is the point if an install is valid or not valid its the same thing except one is 2 bucks one is zero bucks and one is 199 or whatever it is these days

        • Some of those keys are pretty "sus". For example, they will fail an online activation, but you then do an offline activation, copy the challenge code for the hardware, paste it in the key seller's website somewhere, get a response code, and then it is activated... but the problem with doing it that way is that upon a complete reinstall, the activation isn't preserved. The official MS activation binds the key to the BIOS ID, so when the machine is installed from scratch, it will automatically activate with

    • I know the local Goodwill Computer Store used to get the codes off of donated computers and sell them. I'm sure they weren't the only ones.

    • Ego. Contrary to popular belief, corporations aren't just interested in money.

      Commodore went out of business more than 30 years ago, but from their point of view, you still can't use Workbench on an emulator without buying a new license for ancient encrypted ROMs. Go figure.

  • Windows 11 isn't worth paying for, it doesn't bring enough to the table to declare itself a value add, especially compared to other OSes. If Microsoft is going to kill off using old license keys, then why not just give up the pointless and stupid licensing? Windows should become a GPL (or other open license), product. I drive Fedora 38 as my primary OS, and it makes Windows 11 seems like a buggy V-Tech toy notebook OS.

    I just updated Windows 11 to 23HX, and none of the bugs that have plagued it for y

    • Agreed on the licensing front. Desktop should be free and that would drive demand for the servers and online services that it can link with.

      Looking the other way while students and geeks pirated was a decent part of how Windows came to dominate.

      I continue with my migration to Linux, though. And it's not about the money, it's about how MS treats the users of it's OSes... with thinly veiled contempt. But it's also about the money.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      But if you have Windows 7 or 8, then Windows 10 or 11 are worth paying for, at least if you want to stay legal.

      For the simple reason that old Windows versions are not supported anymore. And Linux is far from a drop in replacement.

      What is not worth paying for is Windows 11 when you have Windows 10, but that one is free. In other word and unsurprisingly, Windows 11 is free when you don't need it.

      • Right, so Windows 11 as a free upgrade from Windows 10 is fine, but at no point should you spend money on Windows. If Microsoft doesn't upgrade to an open license, then just move to a professional OS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Nixos. Linux does have distributions which are excellent drop-in replacements, Fedora is one example, but Debian, Nixos, Ubuntu or Mint are also excellent choices. I have played with PopOS, and it was exceptional as well, so there's a lot of choice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      You have no idea how much money MS collects from annual software licenses from corporate/educational/government, it is a HUGE pile of money.

      The sale of Windows licenses to OEMs is another huge pile of money (money per computer built w/ windows 11 installed).

      The retail sale of Windows licenses is not a significant revenue generator (home system builders keep migrating their product keys from old builds to new builds in my experieince).

    • I haven't had to, but I'm fairly sure you can download a Windows ISO from MS with a key.

      Why you'd do that and not get something with a proper package manager and office suite like Debian and LibreOffice I don't know.

      • Does apt-get resolve dependencies, download any you need, over multiple layers and install them all at once as dnf does? I'm not trying to start a war here but I would like to know. I've heard claims that it's not good at that, but those were all from several years ago, and if that's been fixed I'd feel a lot better about suggesting Ubuntu to Windows refugees as that's one less gotcha for them to trip over.

        • > over multiple layers and install them all at once as dnf does

          You'd have to define what you mean by that, as that could be treated as snapshot transaction like, so that all changes appear at once. I don't believe dnf or apt do this.

          Dependency problems are zero as far as I'm concerned, I've been running bullseye/bookworm and bookworm/trixie without issue.

          As far as refugees goes, Ubuntu is probably the sane choice for someone who want's a corporation at the other end.

          • What I meant was that dnf finds all unmet dependencies, checks them for any new dependencies and keeps going until there aren't any more. Then, it downloads and installs them from the bottom up so that all of the packages that you wanted installed are, with no missing dependencies. Just to avoid nitpicking, it stops if there are any dependencies left that it can't find and install.

            • That sounds like all package managers. dpkg will let you do the insane things like extracting packages with unmet dependencies, but apt has always been pretty good at managing the package dependency tree.

              Upstream in debian QA packages will not migrate from unstable into testing if they break dependency trees so end users don't end up in problematic situations if they're on testing/stable.

              • That's also true with the official Fedora repositories, but things like that happen once in a while with third-party repos, which is one reason why I never use them.

    • I found the upgrade useful, because I had a Pro license with Windows 8. Buy the new computer wiht W11 pre-installed with the "screw you Home Users" edition, I just upgraded it in-place with the old license.

      While not worth paying for, the older Windows versions are declared persona non-grata already by Microsoft - the kicked the kids out of the house and rented out their rooms to hobos. So unless you can go full Linux or MacOS (which is getting worse every year in their attempt to copy Microsoft), or you d

      • Annoyingly, you're correct, that you need Windows 11. The reason you require 11 is that companies don't develop products to work across platforms, and the web offerings are usually a joke.

        I used to run Windows 11 in a VM, but that stopped working due to the massive number of graphical problems I kept running into, so I'm forced to run it on bare metal. All that being said, I still maintain, and will keep maintaining Windows 11 is not for professionals.
  • All this means is the used micro pc market is about to get cheaper. I never put windows on them anyway so its a win for me.
  • But there will be few hardware that was able to run windows 7 or 8 that can run windows 11. If you go with a new computer you have to, officially, buy a new license, unless you still have an unused key laying around.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      You can deactivate retail copies of Windows OS and re-use the retail Product Key to install Win 11 on a different system.

      OEM Product Keys may be able to be transferred to a new computer, I'm just not sure - I think I remember hearing some people had done it, but it's been a long time.

      It has been this way for decades, this is nothing new - the new portion is the ability to use older product keys for newer versions of windows (in other words, you could always transfer a retail Win 7 product key from one syste

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        In theory OEM product keys are tied to the machine they were sold with. Microsoft defines the machine as the motherboard, so you can replace everything else and keep using that licence.

        In practice, you can activate OEM keys on other machines, or swap your mobo. When activating it might ask you some questions about how many copies you have installed, but it will let you do it in the end.

    • I'm done with Microsoft when I can't use 10 anymore. 11 is *way* too intrusive.

  • I literally activated Win 11 Pro on a re-purposed thin client laptop (Dell Wyse 5470) with a Windows 7 Ultimate Product Key a friend of mine gave me.

    This worked at 5:00 CST on Sept 28th the thin client had NO pre-installed Windows OS with a no windows product key.

    It is in Microsoft's interest to enable as many windows users to run Win 11/Current Windows, and repurposing old Win 7/8/8.1/10 to activate Win 11 is an easy way to accomplish that.

    MS (at least used to) offer free Windows product keys/activations f

  • Anyway

    • I dunno how many of you are sitting on diamonds out there, but why this isn't modded funny as fuck-all is way past me. +1 Funny
  • Activating Windows 7 with an activation key that you can still buy, would have more practical import.

    Running 10, much less 11, on hardware that originally shipped back when Windows 7 was still being sold, is essentially impossible anyway, regardless of licensing or activation issues. I mean, you can _install_ it, but once it's installed, all it's ever going to do is thrash the swapfile endlessly in a futile attempt to get caught up on updates. You can't actually *use* a system like that. Simple things li

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      I have a machine that was new firmly in the Windows 7 era. It even has a genuine Windows 7 license. It runs 10 no problem, but Microsoft won't let it upgrade to 11.

  • When can we update from Win11 to Win7? (Score:3)

    by zephvark ( 1812804 ) on Friday September 29, 2023 @01:23PM (#63887391)

    I am glad Microsoft is giving up its relentless push to move people to its latest catastrophe. It's time to seize the moment and provide Windows 11 users with a way to upgrade to previous operating systems.

  • Jus installed a windows 11 for test, and activated with a new key from MSDN Windows 8 without any issues,

  • Fine (Score:2)

    by kackle ( 910159 )
    I'll just install Windows 9, then.
  • I wouldn't mind so much having to buy windows again on my next PC, but there's no way to do it without forking over your identity and linking a Microsoft account to your PC. I recently tried buying an office key third party and couldn't get around the Microsoft account requirement so gave up and returned the key (at great protest of the reseller). Even if Ms does phone activation, they'll definitely be logging phone numbers and tying Identity that way. The only way to have an anonymous install in future

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      I was helping a friend set up a new computer and needed to install Windows from a USB stick. A Google search for how to do it turned up a bunch of little utilities to burn the image file. They come with handy little checkboxes to turn off things like the Live account registration and most of the spying. What a relief.

  • As it stands now, I can give money for Windows, but I'm not able to buy it - they require a substantial amount of personal information I do not want to give them, and there is always that online association. It can't be avoided.

    Total trash.

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