1984Microsoft kills official way to activate windows without internet
myplacedkThis alone is enough for me, to consider Windows a bad choise.
I’ve said that line so many times.
artyomI‘ll stay with 10 until I figured out Bitwig.
What’s your current DAW of choice?
Yes it’s Ableton, will try it out.
I think Bitwig was made by former Ableton employees, so it has a very similar workflow. It’s by far my favorite DAW, although nowadays, I’m trying to use Zrythm since I want to use as much open source software as possible.
oftenawakeBitwig on Linux is amazing and was the final thing which let me ditch Windows for good after years of using Linux for everything else.
You won’t regret it!
I would note that every single time I’ve tried to reactivate windows after a mobo or CPU upgrade, it has failed.
I guess it’s supposed to work better if you sign into your Microsoft account ever, which I don’t, because I see literally no reason they would need me to expect to advance spyware and adware.
The phone activation is the only thing that has worked. Good thing I’ve been dual booting a Ubuntu fork for the past six months. I guess after my next hardware upgrade I’ll be Linux only.
Who wants a computer which might not work after an upgrade and not because there’s an actual problem but because a corporation says no? It’s more stress and more work out of nowhere. Corporations should never be allowed to brick devices, but since they are, I choose “not corporation” as my permanent fix. It’s a good move!
look fuck microsoft, but - who is trying to activate windows without any internet access at all?
Sorry souls who don’t want to create a MS account if they just need to reimage a PC or only need a local account. Such a blatant attempt at locking folks into their ecosystem. Same as Apple.
this isn’t about microsoft accounts or local accounts on OC. this is just about activating the OS which you can do on a provided website (without an account).
Some years ago, I was using an ancient (even then) Dell laptop that I took with me to my grandparents summer camp for two weeks vacation. Northern Vermont, landline phone service only. My dad had sent me Win 7 Ultimate and I installed it sitting on the camp deck. I called in the activation.
Not Windows, but I’ve reinstalled my Mac laptop OSes many times when I’ve swapped out a SSD. Also at camp. I did a full - unsupported no less! - install of Mojave macOS on an ancient MacPro that my aunt and uncle used to run their music and movies on. They had no internet and rented DVDs and ripped their own CDs. Once I showed my Uncle how to edit the track info in iTunes, he was off and running.
I know lots of people - older mostly - with computers that only have internet access on their phones. FFS, my mom only has text on her flip phone, (her phone provider switched over to 4G and they sent her a smartphone of some kind which she could not use, so she sent it back and they got her a 4g enabled flip phone) and I’ll mail her big USB sticks with movies and tv shows on them so she uses her laptop. No internet, no electricity even, unless it’s from their solar panels.
Pretty much anyone off the grid would phone in activation or roll with an OS that doesn’t require it (like macOS and Linux).
I know lots of people - older mostly - with computers that only have internet access on their phones.
exactly. you can use your phone to go to the windows activation site. you don’t need the PC you’re activating to have internet.
Where do you find the Internet on a flip phone?
The 4G one she’s got from her service provider offers some form of limited access. Not sure, maybe the fancy ones have it? My mom will occasionally text me links to news items she’s found.
When i’m saying “Older mostly” am talking about people in their 70’s and 80’s that don’t use their phones for much more than texting and email.
NGL, at 61 I can’t use my phone for much more than that. I just cannot SEE it well enough for it to not be a massive frustrating ordeal.
Just wait until presbyopia strikes. It’s a bitch when the collagen breaks down in the body and the lenses in the eyes start to stiffen. Hit me in my mid 40’s. Fuck.
Owning a summer camp, but ripping CDs?
Indeed! Of all things, uncle turned me on to higher bitrate 320k VBR, highest quality .mp3 rips.
I got his CD collection after he died (his own music was lost as the drive had failed while he was in the nursing home) and took a few weeks and re-ripped everything for him. Gave him a junker MacBook and loaded up it and his iPod with his favorite music.
The last day I saw him - 3 days before he died, he was already seeing people that weren’t there and talking to them, which is part of the dying process I’m told…
I put his iPod on him and played him his favorite artist - Miles Davis and he stopped when the song Générique (go listen to it, it is a beautiful song) came on and he looked at me - SAW me - and smiled and said it was his favorite Miles tune.
We chatted for a few minutes more and he fell asleep and I told him I loved him and gave him a kiss and left for work. Passed away the day after the Eclipse last spring.
Beast gift I got was that jazz library from him.
Grandparents owned the summer camp.
Grandfather was a union electrician for over 40 years. Retired in 1994. Made fantastic coin and bought the camp in the mid-70’s, for less than $20k. Landlines only that far north into Vermont. Grandparets were both in their late 70’s early 80’s when the internet took off, so it meant nothing to them. Both were gone of old age by 2020.
Aunt was the black sheep of the family and her husband - the uncle - were old alcoholic hippies that lived hand to mouth. Welfare recipients with drug and alcohol problems who both died - one of alcohol fueled dementia (Koursakoff’s Disease) and the other of sepsis (bone infection in the foot) from unmanaged diabetes - at the start of 2024.
Your point is?
„Ripping“ meant something else to me, and the tech fell out of fashion before I could know better.
Ah, yeah. Times and terms change.
I still will pick up old CD’s at thrift stores and flea markets fr a few bucks and rip them to my computer system.
I have a monstrous music library. (don’t even get me going on the vinyl LPs I’ve got)
Had a friend give me a used service drive from a computer repair shop and it had a customer’s backup music library on it as large as my own at the time. 80+ GB of stuff.
Incorporated that in a hearteat.
For years I did repairs and drive replacements for the kids in the neighborhood and often they’d be more than happy to let me duplicate their music libraries. I didn’t charge a lot so it was a win/win situation.
That and finding a shocking amount of music on dumpster dive laptops… esp machines from the 2008 - 2012 era.
Know a family (fairly well off) that sold a summer home a few years back and they moved on a ton of stereo equipment and one was a crazy big Sony CD changer that had a carousel of 100 disks in it… Guess what was still filled with CD’s?
Granted it’s “grandma” music, and lots of stuff like Burt Bacharach and Barbara Streisand, but some of that is actually really good, solid songwriting. Not my favorite kind of music, but given the AI slop online now, it makes it easy to hear how shitty that is.
What, if I may ask, does „Ripping“ mean to you?
Am always interested in different takes on words.
People who live in third world countries like the US who don’t have Internet at home/internet isn’t available to them because it’s not profitable for the company providing for that area.
Well, I’ve never done it because it’s not part of my tasks, but for example industrial PCs used for SCADA usually run Windows, and they are never allowed on the internet, so…
Nah, they’re run by the laziest chucklefucks you’ve ever met - they’re plugged right into a broadband modem with no firewall running bog standard teamviewer or RDP awaiting any connection (no filtering) because the people setting up and using these systems have no concept of infosec. They know how to set up their industrial system, plug it into the ‘computer thingy’, and hand it off the the municipal water dude who is a flat earth, anti-fluoride, moon-landing hoax, J6-denialist who knows nothing about technology, but wants to run the town’s water treatment from his cell phone.
(not that I’m jaded by small town dynamics or anything)
Other side of the same coin: I work for a municipality, and I can’t even connect my phone because they use MAC whitelists for the entire network. Many cities used to be pretty lax about cybersecurity, but a few high profile attacks have made most of them (at least anything larger than a small town) rethink that stance. Hell, one city a few miles away had a ransomware attack that left their city services entirely unavailable for like three weeks. That was actually studied by lots of the local cities, to see what they can do to prevent similar attacks.
We have our clients switch to Linux now. Ignition works well enough and it’s so much cheaper. It has drawbacks compared to wonderware, or the Siemens stack though. But I’ll take those issues over logging into their systems still running on winXP.
10s of nerds on a Linux forum who definitely were messing with Windows 🙄
potoooooooo ✅️You’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking “who is trying to use Windows without any Internet access at all?”
Which is definitely some people/situations. It’s not the standard user-centric use case that Microsoft expects, but it does exist.
no, that’s not the question. you can still use windows without internet access, you just need some other device to get to the activation website. like a phone or another computer.
I’m not, but unless I call the phone support I can’t get my windows to activate.
This is the dumbest decision for one reason alone: some laptops and desktops that lack updated drivers cannot connect to the internet.
It literally happened to me with a lenovo laptop, where I had to find a way to bypass the internet requirement or else I’d have a $800 paperweight.
If I didn’t need Windows for a specific reason I’d be on Linux, believe me. But this decision is ridiculous.
Activation scripts can be put onto a USB drive, so if nothing else, there’s always a way to keep using the hardware you paid for (assuming you want to stay hostage to these fucks)
AniviaI don’t see how this particular thing is an issue. You don’t need to activate Windows during the setup. You can skip activation, update the driver, and then activate windows afterwards
or use your phone or any other device to get the activation key.
I think the real problem is setting up Windows without a Microsoft account?
The moment I needed Microsoft’s permission to use my computer after installing a graphics card, I made an image of the drive, wiped it and installed a Linux distribution. That was 2008, and I’ve been a very happy computer user since.
I know not everyone can make that switch, but it’s easier than ever before, and Valve has really changed the calculus with Proton. Gaming was the biggest thing holding back Linux adoption (IMO).
I’ve gone back and forth between Linux and Windows as my daily driver- biggest problem for me was and still is lack of Adobe Creative Cloud support/good photo editors. Wound up switching to Mac for work stuff but use a SteamDeck and run Bazzite on a gaming rig hooked up to TV.
Adobe is sadly the only thing that still requires windows.
Fuck Adobe and everyone there, they were the OGs that started the subscription bullshit for software and they had such dominance no business could say no, thus no schools could say no.
And they’ve just been buying up competition since, so no one can challenge them.
Adobe and Oracle are the software equivalent of cancer.
Fuck Adobe and everyone there, they were the OGs that started the subscription bullshit for software….
For home use, sure. For business use in a business that’s regulated, it’s a godsend. No longer do I have to fight with management about why we need to upgrade Adobe Acrobat even though we “just” bought it 5 years ago.
You pay and it stays up to date. No more vulnerabilities that go unpatched because “we just bought the software” (5 years ago and it’s out of support).
This garbage makes me so glad I switched to Linux Mint. Gaming has been just fine. Sure there have been a few hurdles, but they were well-worth spending time on as Microsoft continues this foolishness.
TrackinDaKrakenI’ve been perfectly happy on Mint since switching over a year ago. The few games I play run just fine (FO4, FOLON, Portal, and such), and the other apps work too, GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice, Blender, etc.
In spite of the recent post about which Linux distro to recommend, and seeing many no longer recommend Mint, I’ll stick with Mint. It just works.
I’d switch off windows but most of the games I play won’t work on Linux due to “anti cheat”.
Not judging, just curious.
What games are those? In the last 12 months I tried 151 games on Linux. All of them worked, only 6 required tinkering.
The fact they mentioned “anti cheat”, it’s going to be your modern online multiplayer games. It’s going to be games like Fortnite, PUBG, Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.
Glog78