How's it going guys, I'm ThioJoe. And if you've been around the block a few times,
you may have noticed on occasion that some people have the dreaded message at
the bottom right of Windows that tells them that they have not activated Windows yet,
or it's a non genuine version and that they need to buy a license of Windows.
But what exactly are the consequences of not activating Windows? That's what we're
going to go over today. And it might be pretty interesting to you. Before we get started as
usual going to plug my Instagram account. I post hilarious jokes on there. God forbid don't go over
there. If you have a heart condition, you're going to literally die from laughing so hard.
I also post pretty cool tech related stuff every once in
a while. So it should be worth it. It's just @ThioJoe over on Instagram. Anyway,
what exactly does happen if you refuse to activate Windows right away or just never
do it? The answer is going to heavily depend on which version of Windows you're running.
And we can obviously start with Windows 10 because it's the most recent version,
but we can also go over Windows 8, Windows 7, even though that's going to be going away very
soon. And of course, for historical purposes, we can talk about Vista and XP. So first off,
what exactly happens when you don't activate Windows 10?
Well, the answer is really not much. And in previous versions there was like a grace
period of about 30 days, where before that there was no issue, it would run like normal,
but after 30 days things would get a bit screwy, and we're going to get to
these. But on Windows 10, there is no grace period, it's all the same whether Windows
is just activated or not, it's one or the other. But there aren't really that many consequences or
penalties if Windows 10 is not activated. The first of course is the most obvious,
it'll show at the bottom right on the wallpaper that you have not activated Windows yet. It'll
tell you to do that. Also, if you go into the settings at the bottom, the window will also
tell you that you need to activate Windows, and that it's not activated. Neither of these
are going to actually impair your usage of Windows. And besides those,
really the only thing you actually would notice, the only limitation imposed on you,
is that you can't really customize Windows in any way. So you can't do custom taskbar colors. You
can't set a custom Windows desktop background, you can't do anything in the personalization settings.
So depending on who you are, these penalties might not even be something you notice really,
but obviously I would not recommend this. You should always pay for what you use, otherwise
the economy would not be in good hands if everyone just stole everything. But if you are, for
whatever reason, running Windows 10 not activated, probably not going to be any big issues.
And towards the end of the video I can talk about why I personally think there are so few
limitations on nonactivated versions of Windows, but we'll get to that later. So onto Windows 8,
things are kind of similar to Windows 10 in that there's no grace period, it's either
one or the other activated or nonactivated, and you get a few penalties if it's not activated.
But it is a little bit more annoying than on Windows 10. As with every version of Windows,
again you're going to see that little notification on the bottom right of the
desktop telling you it's not activated. But you'll also get some other notifications,
like in the actions panel, it'll show you like a little notification saying, "Hey it's not
activated." And also again in the PC settings, it'll tell you the same thing to activate.
And just like with Windows 10, it's the same deal with personalization. There
are no settings you can do with personalization. No app colors,
desktop backgrounds, things like the lock screen wallpaper. You can't change account icons,
that sort of thing. That's all the same, no customization. So really the only main
difference which is probably the most annoying, is that every six hours or so,
you will get a full screen activation prompt that will pop up and tell you, "Hey, you have
an activated Windows, just a quick reminder," and that should overlay over anything you're doing.
Which could be very, very annoying depending on what you're doing. If you're like on a conference
call or something, and you're doing a screen share, then, uh, you know, if the activation
prompt pops up, that might be a bit embarrassing. Or maybe if you're playing a video game and you're
about to clutch the round, and it pops up and you die, that could also be annoying.
So that is something that you have to be aware, of every six hours might not be that annoying,
but of course we know that with Windows, whether it's time to restart the computer automatically,
or this pop-up, it tends to happen at the worst possible time. But other than those annoyances,
there really isn't anything that will prevent you from using Windows 8.
So moving on to Windows 7, Windows 7 was actually the last version of
Windows that had a grace period. And it actually had several different segments
of grace periods. And with the last one, it gets to the point where it
actually does possibly impair your usage of Windows. And we'll get to that in a second.
So what would happen though is for the first three days, if you don't activate Windows,
pretty much nothing happens. There's like a little icon in the system tray that is a prompt to
activate Windows. But other than that, you really wouldn't even notice. Next for days 3 through 27,
you're going to get a daily pop-up message from the taskbar telling you to activate Windows.
But again that's once a day, you can just close that out,
you won't really notice anything. But after the 27th day and for the next three days,
so through the final part of the grace period, it'll actually pop up every four hours from the
taskbar. So it's really trying to remind you, but again nothing really impairing in Windows,
you can just close it out. After 30 days though,
they really start to drop the hammer on you. So, first of all, you're going to every single hour,
get a pop-up the same one you've been getting, telling you to activate Windows,
so that could get annoying it's every single hour. And also any time you open up the control panel,
there will also be a message that you have not activated and prompt you to do that.
But probably the two biggest penalties, first of all, you can change your desktop background,
but it will revert to a black background every single hour. So you may as well not
be able to change the desktop background and that could get extremely annoying. The other
biggest penalty possibly, is that you will not be able to install system updates at all.
So I don't know if this includes security updates and critical updates. It might include just like
super essential ones, but feature updates definitely would not be able to be installed,
so don't expect anything from that. And that is something that potentially would be
detrimental and something that would probably be worth it for a lot of people to upgrade,
if you want the latest secure version of Windows.
But besides those three penalties, the system updates the wallpaper and the annoying pop-ups,
there really isn't anything actually stopping you
from using Windows 7 after that grace period. Next up, we have Windows Vista,
which is obviously ancient history these days, but it's still interesting to talk
about because Windows Vista was a bit more hardcore when it came to the penalties,
it's kind of interesting. And the penalties for Vista actually changed at one point. So
there was one set of penalties for the first version of Windows Vista released,
the RTM, "Release To Manufacturer". And then after service pack one,
it changed the penalties, so we'll go over both. So with the original release of Windows Vista,
you had a 30 day grace period where pretty much nothing happened.
And then after that, there was a reduced functionality mode,
which had some pretty hardcore penalties. The first wasn't really a big deal. It would
not let you play built-in games. So I don't think anyone really cared about Minesweeper
or solitaire or whatever. The next penalty was that there were no premium features in Vista,
the first of which was not allowed was the aero glass theme. So that
was kind of like the little blurry modern theme that was interested
introduced in Vista and then kind of polished in the later versions. Also,
you could not get access to ReadyBoost or BitLocker, but if you didn't really use those
features, you probably wouldn't have noticed, but the third one definitely you would have.
So the third penalty, which was definitely the most extreme,
was that you would not be allowed to stay logged into Windows Vista for more than an hour,
it would actually log you out. And I believe I'm not really sure if this is the truth,
I think it would actually shut down Windows completely. So it would either force you to
log in again, or possibly even shut down your computer completely. So if you did
not activate Windows, really, you couldn't use the computer in any meaningful way. Now
after Vista service pack one, Microsoft did chill out a little bit with the penalties.
So there's still the 30 day grace period, but you still could technically keep using Windows.
It did not force you to log out every single hour like it did before, but it removed the
ability to personalize your computer, which is what was carried forward into latest versions.
And it would also pop up periodically a thing telling you to activate as soon as you could.
However, the most extreme penalty in this case, was that it did not allow you to install any
Windows updates except critical updates. So this would presumably be for security updates,
but if there were any like bug fixes or something, or like feature updates,
then you could not get those if you did not have an activated version of Windows.
Now finally onto Windows XP, this one had by far the most extreme penalty that we've
talked about in this video. And that is that after the 30 day grace period,
you could not use Windows at all. It wouldn't let you boot into Windows,
you had to activate it or would not work. So none of this business about annoying pop-ups
and trying to coax you in to doing it by reducing your personalization,
it was either you activate or you're screwed. Now you might be wondering
at this point why Microsoft chilled out and went more lenient over the years,
because with Windows XP obviously, it was like you can't use it all. And then
now we get to the point with Windows 10, where there's very little penalty at all.
You can use it as much as you want you just can't customize it at all. So why did Microsoft do this
now? I'm going to give my opinion and obviously this is not going to be a hundred percent correct,
so don't expect this to be totally true, I could be wrong. But I do believe this is also going to
be a similar reason to why Microsoft offered the free upgrade to Windows 10 in the past years.
So I think it's going to be the same reason why they pretty much just let using it without
activating. Now, the first thing to note is I expect that Microsoft makes by far most of their
money from Windows activations from companies like manufacturers that are building lots and lots of
computers, and they're buying these licenses in bulk and then putting them on all their computers.
I think a very small, small fraction of Windows keys are being sold directly to consumers. So you
already have a small percentage of people who are building new computers or actually do want
to buy the key to upgrade their version of Windows and put it on their computer
themselves. And that's such a small percentage and probably most of those people are not pirating
anyways. If you're building a computer, most people pay for the key. And so it's probably
such a small percentage of small percentage of people that are actually pirating, that it's
almost not even worth it pursuing those people and spending the money trying to get around them,
when they'll probably be able to circumvent it anyway, when they're making so much money
from legitimate users. And I think that the people who are willing to pirate Windows and
go through all that trouble to not be able to customize it, and they really don't want
to pay that money. Then they are the people who are going to circumvent it anyway. So they're
probably not going to recover much money at all from forcing people to try and activate
if they haven't. And the other reason, which I think is the same reason they
released a free upgrade to Windows 10, is that they just want as many people using
Windows and Windows 10 in particular as possible. And that way they can monetize
their Windows installations in other ways, such as people running Microsoft office or running
things like OneDrive or just buying from the Windows store, things like that. They figure,
"look, if these people are going to pirate Windows and they're not going to buy our $100 key,
we're probably not going to make any money off them anyway, we may as well just let them use
Windows, obviously in an inferior capacity. So no customization. We have to, you know,
give them some incentive, but hopefully we'll get some money out of them in other ways."
And of course it is entirely possible that they will you know,
get as many people using Windows 10 as possible. And then they'll just change
that as the final version of Windows like I kind of think what they're moving towards,
instead of Windows 10 it'll just be Windows. Everyone will be using Windows.
And then at that point they could start implementing more extreme penalties,
really forcing people to activate if they haven't already. So they could just let people on,
get them addicted to Windows, and then force them to activate later. I don't know if that's
going to happen, but it's possible. So I think that pretty much answers it.
If you're not going to activate Windows 10, what happens? The answer is really not much, but you
still should really do it. So that's it, if you guys want to keep watching, I'll put some other
videos right here you can click on. If you want to subscribe I make a couple new videos a week,
should be worth it. And let us know down in the comments what you think, if you run an activated
version of Windows or maybe you were previously a pirate and you're not anymore, let us know why.
So anyway, thanks so much for watching guys. I hope to see you again and have a good one.