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[King Zultan]

If I'm reading that right your saying I could pull the product key from the dying drive and use it to install windows 7 on a new drive and it would be okay with it and not make me buy it.

[methylatedspirit]

One more thing, if by chances is not windows 10 but 7 or 8, but want to upgrade to 10, I have seen over the internet you can still upgrade it to 10 for free, but haven't really check it out.

I think Windows 7 and 8 keys work in Windows 10 perfectly fine, but it's tied to your motherboard, since it's a digital license. Not sure if it's invalid for Windows 7/8 after that.

Also does the drive in your wanting to clone need to be be the one in use when cloning it?

Not too clear on what that means. Interpreted as "Does the drive you wish to clone from (i.e. the source drive) need to be in use (unclear: "in use" interpreted as: "is plugged in as the main system drive using internal connectors (SATA, M.2...)") when cloning it?" Continuing with that interpretation:

Nah, as long as you've already plugged both drives in by some method (including USB-to-whatever adapters), it should be detected in Clonezilla. You could pull both the source and target drives out, and plug them into a completely unrelated system, and they would still be detected in Clonezilla. Just make sure you know which drive is which; your drives will only identified by their capacity and model number, no drive letters. I suggest using CrystalDiskInfo to know which one is which.

[wierd]

One more thing, if by chances is not windows 10 but 7 or 8, but want to upgrade to 10, I have seen over the internet you can still upgrade it to 10 for free, but haven't really check it out.

I think Windows 7 and 8 keys work in Windows 10 perfectly fine, but it's tied to your motherboard, since it's a digital license. Not sure if it's invalid for Windows 7/8 after that.

Might not be legal, but the windows 7 installer is offline, and does not verify the key against the windows update server on a fresh installation. It only validates that the key matches the microsoft hashing algorithm that generates keys.

Also does the drive in your wanting to clone need to be be the one in use when cloning it?

Not too clear on what that means. Interpreted as "Does the drive you wish to clone from (i.e. the source drive) need to be in use (unclear: "in use" interpreted as: "is plugged in as the main system drive using internal connectors (SATA, M.2...)") when cloning it?" Continuing with that interpretation:

Nah, as long as you've already plugged both drives in by some method (including USB-to-whatever adapters), it should be detected in Clonezilla. You could pull both the source and target drives out, and plug them into a completely unrelated system, and they would still be detected in Clonezilla. Just make sure you know which drive is which; your drives will only identified by their capacity and model number, no drive letters. I suggest using CrystalDiskInfo to know which one is which.

Windows Genuine Advantage was a component of windows 7, and it would keep information about the hardware an OS is installed on, so that you cannot say, bounce a removable drive between multiple hardware platforms. 

When, how, and why WGA gets tripped, and then wants to call the mothership for re-authorization, is a valid source of concern.

[LordBaal]

If I'm reading that right your saying I could pull the product key from the dying drive and use it to install windows 7 on a new drive and it would be okay with it and not make me buy it.

So long is the same computer (mother board) it should work. Back in the day I heard tales of people changing too much their system, new video card, expansion cards, cd drives, ram or even cpu and the windows suddendly not activating because it was a "different" system, despite being still the same MB, never happened to me however.

It should be noted this is for OEM keys. Regular keys work on a number of activations instead.

[King Zultan]

Does that mean if the motherboard dies and I replace it with the exact kind I still have to buy a new product key?

[wierd]

Possibly. You may have to contact microsoft customer support, inform them that the old motherboard died, and that you replaced it with an identical model, which is why the bios unique ID is different, and ask them to please re-authorize the key.

[Starver]

Microsoft would like you to.Though for at least most of the time this has been an issue (and I haven't heard about this kicking up a stink in the Win10 era, but I may have missed it) there was always the possibility of somehow reregistering (automatic, but with an 'allowance' number/rate before awkward questions, or phone-supported) when the installed mechanism got personally bothered by a bit too much change.

For exact current details, I'd defer to others who have done this properly (I'm still slightly regretting not getting an additional Win7 OEM licence while I still could, as I really don't like the way the Windows train went on from there) but the installs/massive rehardwarings I had to do up to Win8 (not my machines, but no sign it bothered the owners about anything like that after 30 days/whatever) were fairly painless as far as it went...

*ninjaed*

[bloop_bleep]

What exactly do people not like about Windows 8-10?

[LordBaal]

When windows 8 came rolling with the whole metro UI I was a network admin on a large factory and had over 50 users under my wing + a dozen or so of computers working with PLC and various machine controls, it was a branch but actually was the biggest site and it shadowed even the central office/factory.

The board of the company decided (without input from anyone of IT, we were a headless department) it was time to adopt new technologies, so an update to windows 8 was the next move, right of the bat at the moment it came out. This kind of decisions, updating everyone at once, in the live environment without ample testing is... bad to say the least, but whatever. I opposed to the decision but the only one I could formally write about was the department boss which had not even a seat in most management meetings so... my last attempt was to at least allow for some training to the staff before the update, denied because "c'mon is very easy, I use it at home already".

Since nickle and diming is universal, of course I had to prepare and make sure every computer was capable of actually running the thing and some of them (still with XP) of course weren't, so I delayed the thing by soliciting new hardware which I knew took ages for them to process but the mother fuckers seemed to be out to get me and sent new replacement machines within a few weeks, which was a bittersweet surprise. But I digress.

The update was done and besides some compatibility issues with some programs everything went surprisingly smooth, to the point it took little over a week to do it on all computers it was possible (keep in mind I was working alone and the site was several square miles in terrain, some of the machines still run in XP to this day because of... reasons).

Soon I was flooded with calls of everyone trying to get to the desktop, confused over where the fuck the old button (start menu) was? Some printing issues but mostly the complains about the interface. While in practice it was better and performance actually improved on some machines, metro kicked around 70% of the users right in the face. After a few days the calls dropped but had to install a third party button for some of the oldest chaps, and ended up spreading like a wild fire, at the end of the month most of the machines had this software to emulate the old start menu and I was done with it.

So, long history short, 8 proved to have an UI change too radical for the average person, despite the optimization and all the good stuff, and being easily learned how to access the regular UI.

[Starver]

For my part, I'm an old fuddy-duddy.

Spoiler: There's no TLDR, just skip this if you're not wanting to read a ramble. (click to show/hide)

Things that get abstracted away "for the benefit of users" had by that point got to the point that I start to lose trust in what I see. It took ages to get used to XP over the 9x environment (or true NT family precursors). And I seriously nearly chose Win3.x (i.e. DOS 6.22, and Windows when some lazy programme didn't do its own windowing) over 95  in a machine a bought in that year.

Because it was tangible (6.22 was a fairly good DOS; though PC-DOS and others were better than their original MS rival versions, it was a good one). I actually quite quickly got on with 95 and grew to like it (I even got a job, perhaps, on my ability to explain to the interviewers half a dozen different ways to create a shortcut - an abstraction, yes, but a definitely tangible abstraction - when they had just asked if I knew how to make one). 98 was 95++, though. Skip ME, of course (2K was and is better), XP was far too 'cuddly' but it worked (largely thanks to the NT heritage, not helped by the Bliss/default "ooh look, curved Start Button!" looks. Vista can safely be skipped (UAC!). Seven had/has a number of the bad points of Vista, but was at least more solid. 8 can/must be skipped. Maybe take a look at 8.1 for the 'minor' corrections made over its older sibling, but I was solidly out of love by that point. And I really haven't given Ten enough of a chance (I will admit) in a personal capacity, even though it looks like most people are stuck with (the-ever-changing-)it unless they go off piste, or stay off it like me...



In a proper evaluation I should probably separate superficial appearance (there really is nothing useful about fancy-schmancy redrawn versions of buttons made to look like paint-blots, or even less like buttons, and transparency layers that eat up window-manager resources are often just resource-use for the sake of it) from technical operation (does it do what's required) from technical improvements (in general, later versions are better, especially when other things then require those improvements in place, but - as with UAC - more often with retrograde movement that's more trouble than help in my case and often befuddles or confounds legacy software along the way) and actually useful new paradigms (not that there are many in Windows that weren't previously seen in Mac or other alternate systems, and when those are HAL or other abstracting elements then I'm at best ambivalent about them in whatever platform).


No, this isn't really an argument as to why various things are globally wrong, and everyone should hate Win8 (though they probably should), it's just me. Stuck in the past, because there were plenty of nice things in the past, and I'm able to overlook some of the nasty things. (It's not like it was difficult to rejig the space used through EMM386 to allow Novell ODI network drivers, IPX/SPX, etc, back when this was a thing.)

...and ninjaed by LordBaal (yes, BTW, I agree with all you said here. And suggested elsewhere - to save myself making that reply. ).  At least my company of the time spent a good couple of years on Y2K testing (and general tested migration to 2K over many disperate 9x and even 3.x precursor desktops that came that way from equipment supliers large and small) and then a few years later (after even more testing to ensure data resilience across and between the new systems) did a mass conversion (and hardware change as necessary) to XP, I think only slightly before 7.

I left that position, jumped even... re: the other message, sounded very relatable..., before serious migration to 7 was considered. By my guess, the corporate standard is still for an Extended Support version of Seven outside of purely administrative desktops and maybe laptops, but then my recommendation was also to eschew any Wifi and yet, a few years later, I passed my old offices and checked with my Android and found a (seemingly secured, even guest-secured) corporate Wifi hotspot emanating from the premises.


Sorry, I put a whole load of GeekOut in spoilers, then GeekOut+ in the ninja-adding stuff which I now don't know how best to (also) Spoiler. This is not supposed to be me writing an Agony Aunt message. Apologies to all Normies who are only here for the proper questions and answers, not the extended nostalgia session.

[dragdeler]

10 Suffers from a bad reputation unfairly though. Only real issue is that updates sometimes mess up kind of hacky customisations, and that is hard to be the one calling the shots in terms of updates on 10, it is very insistant on those. The concern is that since they announced W10 will be the last windows IIRC, we can be more or less sure that one day it will patch itself into cancerous addriddled spyware... Like it allready likes to reinstall cortana, spotify, onedrive, xinia and such BS on the big updates.



But I recently acquired a new SBC, an x86 this time: so a raspberry clone with an intel processer where you can install windows. That has given me the chance to see what W10 is like on real low-end systems. And really, it's not that bad. All the videos on single board computers you see online are people totally biased by linux... they will say linux isn't as sluggish, when the video drivers etc perform objectively worse (in the rare case you should be lucky enough to get it running on linux, I mean on x86 there is probably a way but Mali gpu on arm ARE A SCAM!!!!!!!!) and the only real advantage is that the desktop is a bit snappier at 1080p under linux (1080p is a but much for an atom x5-z8350, try 1024x600 on a touchscreen and tell me it isn't snappy linux nerd). W10 will actually launch in tablet mode at such resolutions, mode can be toggled with 2-3 clicks, turns out to be very good at having two windows on screen that have perfectly the same size, tablet mode sucks at the rest though. It is still more welcoming than w8 metro. I think w8 metro was just MS failed attempt at a smartphone centered future, and really they should stick to their fucking lane, why would you fuck up the whole competition with monopolistic bullshit only to copycat fucking hipsterdesigns, I swear executives are a special kind of dumb.



On the plus side: Nowadays you can set up multiscreen stuff and route every programm to another sound device directly in windows without it shitting itself too hard directsound never bluescreened on me, it's the only thing to make full use of DX12, and some stuff simply doesn't run anymore on old computers, for example, I was only able to launch path of diablo, the diablo 2 mod, on w10 ver2020h1(iirc the name). w10 is far from being perfect but compared to anything else? It just works... Sure I miss my w7 being MAIN but technology evolved.

But if you can, have an XP, 7 and 10, separately I swear I got enough stuff I can only run on one of them. Recently I tried to set up a virtual box to win98 but I couldn't get past the bootmanager to install it , I wanna play safecracker dammit.

[King Zultan]

Recently I tried to set up a virtual box to win98 but I couldn't get past the bootmanager to install it , I wanna play safecracker dammit.

This is why I keep around a few laptops that have 98 on them, also because I have loads of 98 and 95 games.



Also my mane problem with Win10 is that you can't disable the updates and there are some programs that no matter how many times you get rid of them they just come back.

[Ulfarr]

10 Suffers from a bad reputation unfairly though.

It's not an unfair reputation. Win10 might be good enough from a technical standpoint but they're the very definition of anti-consumer policies.

When a previously working machine breaks down after their so called "update", then it's not the hardware's fault. Calling it "hacky customization" downplays the fact that they did a poor job at both making and testing said update. It's also shifts the blame to the end user because "how dare they use their previously working hardware".

When they hide the machine's settings and you have to spent hours researching how to do anything then any notion of user friendliness goes out of the window (pun intended). For fuck's sake for something as simple as changing the date format you have to 1) find the proper "control panel" because the so called "settings" don't have the needed options 2) change your region settings to country that commonly uses  the format you want  3) go to the time/date settings and change the format.

When they mark otherwise unnecessary programms as vital simply becasue they happen to be products of theirs, but you don't use them , the OS doesn't use them and you can't get rid of them because even if you unistall them they'll be back in the next update then it's clear that they only care about shoving their bloatware on the end user without respect to their hardware limitations.

When their so called update that they force you to do, only changes the default programm for a certain task from your prefared one to  the one their current executives want to promote then it's clear that they view your machine as their property.

[dragdeler]

I mean when you're regediting aero peak preview tweaks I'd call that hacky allright. I have been meaning to cut the umbilical cord, I will definitly do it on the mini pc

edit: fuck you what kind of key allows to post in one keyhit and then going back shows me a post message window with what I've written plus also a warning somebody posted, with the same message just below the box, that ain't right

anyway yeah I might go nuclear on the small pc to brick it from updating if I manage to, if I'm pleased with the results I might do it on the big one too, but I got a feeling that modern rtx shit and such won't run forever if I have that pc stuck in 2020





I agree that they are anti consumer, even more so in the long term, and evil monopolists. But I'd also say there is no consumer consideration to speak of anywhere else, to begin with:

-mac expensive proprietary hardware, annoying and limiting software formats... all that for a nice skin on the OS and good proprietary peripheral support, come throw money at your problems, meanwhile we don't even fucking bother with thermals

-android IMHO is actively working to uneducate people about tech, don't be concerned where your actual data is stored we will dillute the border between digital and RL, cloud and HDD, you have to get really hacky if you want to do whatever on android meanwhil, te the majority use it just a vector for advertising and having your personal data sold... try installing the appstore on an android that doesn't have it, or uninstalling it on an android that has it, and you will know what the fuck you're up against

-linux x86 is supposed to work but in practice, good luck hope you got very common and generic components

-linux arm their ENTIRE video acceleration hardware is a scam, not only are you fucked on the frontend for the usual linux reasons, no apparantly there is also licencing/ proprietary architecture sheenanigans concerning MALI, on top of being hardly supported by anybody or anything and opengl/es not actually being totally suited for 3d

So yeah pick your poison, I know I would be running windows7 on the maincomputer if it could support DX12.

[Lord Shonus]

But if you can, have an XP, 7 and 10, separately I swear I got enough stuff I can only run on one of them. Recently I tried to set up a virtual box to win98 but I couldn't get past the bootmanager to install it , I wanna play safecracker dammit.

Try PCem - it is a full x86 emulator that emulates anything up to a Pentium I (if host computer is fast enough), and runs 98 quite well. A bit of a pain to get running, but really nice once you do.