Hacker News Reader

Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

How does this work? Is it possible to install a fresh copy of Windows on a vendor laptop without a separate, expensive, "boxed" license?

View on HN

On the laptops I've used with pre-installed Windows (which I reinstalled), the license key was in ACPI table "MSDM". I assume Windows gets it from there automatically. You can extract the license key from Linux with: cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM

Yes; your laptop should have the Windows license embedded in firmware. If it came with one, that is. You can download the Windows installer directly from MS.

Installing all the drivers needed is on you. They might or might not be downloaded from Windows Update.

Since Windows licences are tied to the hardware you can reinstall it from almost any Windows installation media and it should automatically activate.

If you happened to buy a machine with an OEM Windows Home license baked into the motherboard and want to install retail Windows 11 Professional, this makes it extremely frustrating because you no longer get the choice of which version of Windows to use during the install process.

You need to add the EI.cfg and PID.cfg [0] files to the installer medium before booting it. Once you have those files present with the correct syntax, it will install the version you want, but I can't imagine a non-tech person being able to figure this out on his own.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

Couldn't you upgrade after the install?

You can do that too, and it's very easy.

I was mostly concerned with making sure none of the preinstalled Windows Home bloatware would remain after an upgrade. I figured the safest way would be installing Professional right off the bat.

In the good old days (XP and before) one would get either media or a tool to create CDs with the machine... The key was stickered at the bottom.

I switched to Linux also for work laptop sometime after that so I wouldn't know when that stopped.

In general, I think, yes, as long as you're installing the same edition. Usually the license is somehow stored in the firmware.

However, in any case, even with a separate, expensive "boxed" license, Windows helpfully provides a convenient way for the firmware to drop additional useful software (aka crap) onto your fresh clean install. As in, it actively checks whether the firmware would like something executed and if so, executes it without prompting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807

You can install windows 10 for free and leave it like that forever if you can deal with the watermark and non-restrictions like not changing the wallpaper.

Or just find a FOSS KMS and be done with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com