By being smart enough to get their OS packaged with new retail PCs in the 90's while the market for them was just warming up. They kept their stranglehold going by not caring too hard about piracy. Just enough to keep from losing any trademark considerations.
Like others have said, just use official windows and don’t activate, only downside is the watermark afaik.
Alternatively, you can buy licences for like 1-2 $ off eBay and other similar sites. Just make sure the licence and the version you install matches otherwise it won’t activate
Find out what version of windows that laptop ships with, and install that. Windows licenses have been tied to mobos for a while, there’s a good chance it’ll just activate. If you need an installer, you can download ISOs and tools to make a bootable USB from Microsoft’s site.
Mmmm you’re talking about key resellers. A full retail version costs $150. Keys from key resellers are notoriously unreliable. It might work forever, or it might stop working a week after you authenticated. It’s more or less a gamble.
Great if it works for you, sucks if someone just wasted money (however little) on something that’ll stop working - especially if it’s grandma’s machine.
Also, hedge your bets a little better, buy the ones that cost $10 or even $15. Historically speaking those are a safer bet.
Except if the malware has already infected the recovery partition or completely removed it. Personally I'd take no chances and just nuke the HDD and perform a fresh install.
Considering it’s a laptop with a working Windows, it probably already has a licence for the hardware. Just download from Microsoft, wipe disk and install it and see if it works.
Safest image download would be from Microsoft website. You need activation? Look up Microsoft Activation Script (MAS) on Github. Read the readme on how to use it.
NGL I’m so tired right now I thought you were serious about there being a “Windows Debian Edition”
I even googled it lol
I do agree though that if your mum only uses the PC for like day to day browsing she’ll never notice a difference if you put a Windows style skin on your preferred Linux distro. Hell she might notice it being faster all around to be honest.
Add comment