Yeah. I’m about to start building my rig and all that, and I want to know where I can get myself a legitimate key that isn’t purchased with stolen cards, 3rd party BS’d, or gonna be banned by steam or deactivated my MS 6 months later.
And it needs to be less than $139.99, because that’s ridiculous. I don’t want to pirate, and I don’t want to run it un-activated because I will NOT have a FUCKING overlaid watermark on everything while I’m gaming, watching movies, or even just browsing.
My short research today has told me that I’m not finding it sub $80 and being legit. I really just don’t want to get deactivated later, and ESPECIALLY steam banned or something. I’ve sunk a lot of money into steam and am NOT willing to have my account closed and lose all my games and such.
So yeah, no stolen keys, MSDN keys, pirated keys, cracks, or stuff that will get me banned and/or deactivated, but otherwise the lowest price possible. I’ve read that ‘you know who’ is in the same boat with their $20-$30 keys, as is G2A, but IDK. Mainly don’t wanna get banned/deactivated, or have malware/viruses installed from it.
Legitimate? You cant. Maybe a few $ off, and a little cheaper here and there, but not significantly. If its to good to be true, its a stolen key.
Windows isnt that expensive, £220 for windows 10 pro direct from Microsoft, £130 from scan.co.uk (legit site) so about $166. I don’t see whats ridiculous about it. Its an operating system, not a calculator app.
edit: my advice would be to go to a trusted legit computer shop/site. no grey market sites, don’t go to amazon either, its filled with bad keys.
As much as I hate to suggest it, if you have a legit copy of 7 or 8.1, you can upgrade to 10 from that for free still.
I say I hate to suggest it because I tried to find out if that would be a legitimate, legal Windows 10 install from Microsoft and didn’t get anywhere. Two chat sessions, one said I had to call pro support, the other said I had to have our legal department contact Microsoft’s legal department. Or, if private, a personal lawyer in contact with their legal department.
I installed 10, at work, on a laptop that had an embedded 8.1 key in the UEFI. Windows 10 saw that key and automatically activated. The other way to do it is to start with an activated Windows 7 or 8.1 and start the 10 install process from in there. Good chance you’ll end up with an activated copy of 10.
Officially, the free upgrade to 10 period ended July 29, 2016, so it’s sort of a grey area. Microsoft is still allowing it to happen, they just aren’t telling anyone or disclosing if it’s legit.
If you have a student email, you can sign up for Microsoft Imagine. Some schools have lots of stuff including windows 10 and office, but everybody gets windows 8.1 and server 2016(probably to be replaced with 2019 soon)
Not trying to be crappy. Theres issues with those sites, one being keys bought from them tend to eventually get blacklisted by Microsoft and co as they’re either stolen, bought illegitimately on other countries or bought with stolen credit cards.
there was a spout of techtubers making videos promoting windows for $x, just shows how bad tech tubers can get it.
Just to be a pedant, and not encourage piracy, but running steam on a Windows install that used a gray key or is unactivated will not get you banned from Steam. Steam and MS don’t cooperate on such things.
My advice is that if you are building a new system you should be able to get a legit OEM key cheaper than a retail key. The difference is an OEM key is tied to the machine it is first activated on - although MS may allow you to reactivate after a mobo/CPU upgrade
All in all, as per what @Eden said win10 pro is actually decent value at full retail - in reality many of us should donate a similar value to our Linux distribution of choice if we were honest with ourselves, a lot of man hours are needed to build a stable OS.
If you’re not willing to buy from MS, use a different OS. They make a product and want money for it. I won’t comment on the quality of said product, but it’s their prerogative to ask you to pay for what they’ve produced.
This is prime ChoosingBeggars content.
Grey market sites can be sketchy because your key may be retroactively killed. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Heh, no. Grey market keys are thirty bucks, and they aren’t on Amazon or Newegg.
If you only use Windows occasionally, there’s actually not a heck of a lot of reasons to license it at all. It works perfectly fine without a key, you just can’t change the wallpaper and there’s a watermark on the bottom-right of the screen. Windows doesn’t nag you about it with popup windows or anything, and it remains perfectly usable. Updates too.
Good catch. Nevermind, I guess it is sketchy. Thought it would be safe, considering when I search “windows 10” it’s the first that shows up, with 4 stars.
If you want a guaranteed working key, go buy from Microsoft.
It isn’t really sketchy, the issue is amazon has a problem with people selling fakes, scammers. So you need to be careful. If you do get a fake, they’ll always make it right.
