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Comment by klingonopera | Hacker News Reader

I recently reinstalled a colleague's laptop, with Windows 10, done quick and dirty, he was concerned he didn't have a key/license, said doesn't matter, we can install first and activate later.

After installation, the thing was self-activated. Legit ISO downloaded from Microsoft, though via that ISO downloader software, starts with something with "H" and runs ads when you use it.

Kinda makes me wonder why MS is even bothering gatekeeping their ISOs. Why not make them freely available?

...nobody makes cash of OSes anymore... It's market share they're after.

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Modern hardware can store license keys on the motherboard's firmware. When you go to reinstall it checks the device to see if it has any valid Windows keys.

FWIW, this isn't exactly a new feature, just a feature which has been expanded on and is far more common with modern UEFI firmware on devices shipped by OEMs. If you notice, most modern laptops don't ship with a product key sticker anywhere. Instead they have a genuine holographic Windows sticker on it and have the license loaded on the device. This became standard for large OEMs with Windows 8.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS#SLIC

You mean like this? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10I...

That page seems to have some user agent sniffing. If you're on windows it doesn't offer direct iso download.

Of course Windows gets the worse version of it..

Come on over to Linux everyone! We’re bound to have the year of Linux on the desktop, any decade now.

> Of course Windows gets the worse version of it..

Not really. Linux/Macs get iso, which has install.wim larger than 4GB. That means, you cannot copy it to FAT-32 formatted USB and boot it; you have to burn it (or mount as virtual cd in vm).

Alternative would be using dism to split it, but for that, you need working windows machine, leading to chicken-egg problem.

The windows version, although it gets media creator, has install.esd instead of install.wim (with different compression), so it fits into FAT32-formatted filesystem.

Mainstream motherboard OEMs ship UEFI firmware that contains drivers to handle NTFS at boot.

Some of them, it is not mandatory. The quality of implementations varies, some are so terrible, that they have problem with remembering what the user configured (hi, Gigabyte).

You can use exfat and it will fit.

that's technically not supported by the UEFI standard.

>Kinda makes me wonder why MS is even bothering gatekeeping their ISOs. Why not make them freely available?

They are freely available... kind of. There's a site[1] that generates direct download links from microsoft's CDN.

[1] https://tb.rg-adguard.net/public.php

Yeah, they are, but why the hoops? I think they kinda have to justify that somewhere, someone bought the software for a non-neglible amount of money...

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