Free Windows 10 activation, i'm confused.

[Klee]

I just assembled a SUPER cheap gaming pc for a family member to use as a secondary gaming pc at her moms house. She has a i5 gaming pc at her dads.

So since I have a TON of used parts I offered to build a cheap pc.

Only new parts are a cheap Chinese X79 M-ATX Machinist branded board, a mint green color case ( her major requirement was that it be "Pretty" lol) and a non modular Thermaltake 700 w power supply.

I went with that board because I could use some unused server stuff on it, ram and cpu, and it has onboard USB 3.0.

I popped off the chipset cooler and found out it is actually a c602 chipset.

So I built it and installed the drivers off the cd that came with the board, then the latest Nvidia Game ready driver then rebooted then installed Steam and linked it to her account.

So next I started thinking about activation, but when I dug out my list of Windows 7 keys from when I had a MS Technet account to see if any would activate I realized it was already activated.

Used parts:

E5-2643 V1 cpu, GTX 1060 video card, 16 gigs of DDRR ecc ram, Cooler master 212 Evo cpu cooler, Samsung 500 Gb SSD, 400 gb hard drive as a secondary drive, three lighted fans.

The only part that came from a Windows 10 activated pc was the video card.

The SSD had Windows 10 on it, fresh install over Ubuntu on a older laptop but was never activated and would always nag to get me to activate it.

I'm confused, I'm lucky I guess but I just am trying to understand what happened.


Edit: Also I installed using a offline account so no linked login to Microsoft.

 

[Klee]

Pic of build:

 

[PigLover]

I believe that "activated with a digital license" means that the MB itself has a Windows 10 license embedded on it. You usually see it with more recent OEM motherboards in Laptops or Desktop PCs from the big manufacturers (for example, many of the systems Patrick has reviewed in the Mini Micro PC series have embedded license keys).

Surprising to find it on the cheap x79 boards so - Enjoy!

 

[i386]

There were BIOS Mods Back in the day to activate Windows 7/8/10, my guess is this Board has such a bios...

 

[Klee]

Well it sure helped money wise, the build was about $215.00 out of pocket not including tax or shipping with most of the parts needed I already had. I do know when I first installed Windows 10 it did ask to be activated but I just ignored that until I actually went to try one of my keys.

The goal was to build something cheap but good enough to play games at 1080p at mid to high settings, the E5-2643 cpu is pretty snappy feeling.

 

[KC8FLB]

You can use just about any previous edition windows key to activate win 10. They are really trying to get win 10 on everything. You can even run non activated and the only penalty is that you can not customize look and feel wallpapers. Sooner rather than later windows 10 will just be free

 

[Wasmachineman_NL]

Or if you don't want to give MS your money and don't care about legality: KMS_VL_ALL

btw OP, that CPU needs four DIMMs for maximum performance because it's quad channel.

 

[Klee]

Or if you don't want to give MS your money and don't care about legality: KMS_VL_ALL

btw OP, that CPU needs four DIMMs for maximum performance because it's quad channel.

Well I have plenty of Windows 7 keys that I was going to use to save some money but what I ran into was that I never even had to use any on this install since it activated itself.

Thats not a bad thing, lol, I just don't get how it happened.

Also if you look close you can see four 4 gig sticks of ram, pic is a bit blurry since I turned the flash off to show the lights.

Pic with the flash.

You can use just about any previous edition windows key to activate win 10. They are really trying to get win 10 on everything. You can even run non activated and the only penalty is that you can not customize look and feel wallpapers. Sooner rather than later windows 10 will just be free

Yep I do that on all my Windows 10 VM's.

 

[Klee]

I believe that "activated with a digital license" means that the MB itself has a Windows 10 license embedded on it. You usually see it with more recent OEM motherboards in Laptops or Desktop PCs from the big manufacturers (for example, many of the systems Patrick has reviewed in the Mini Micro PC series have embedded license keys).

Surprising to find it on the cheap x79 boards so - Enjoy!

I was surprised for sure.