Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am exploring the notably hostile environment of recycling old Windows keys. Let’s get started!
Among my long-term projects box is a retro gaming VM running one or more old versions of Windows. How hard can it be to move an installation legally?
VM: Virtual Machine
Very.
What is a Computer?
I grew up on Windows. Our tech stockpile has no shortage of outdated machines or extracted hard drives with valid installations of the operating system. Surely, there should be nothing wrong with playing Musical Chairs with components until I have something that meets my needs. Microsoft’s licensing doesn’t work that way.
I feel like Moses proclaiming, “Let my people go!” to Pharoh with the way nostalgia of boyhood intermingles with a starkly contrasting mission. The worst I’ve had Linux complain about hardware is when I duplicated a Debian drive and GRUB got upset over a UUID mismatch (it remains unaddressed to this day). To illustrate: I’ve had three Windows XP installations sitting around for years – one on the Old Church Computer I’ve been featuring lately and a couple pulled from other machines. I tried booting one of the pulled drives with the Old Church Computer, and the obtuse operating system asked for its installation disk before it would consent to my game of Musical Chairs. For all intents and purposes, Windows figures your computer is your motherboard because that’s most involved part of the system.
UUID: Unique Universal IDentifier – a [hopefully] unique number for identifying hard drives
Product ID’s and Keys
Major versions of Windows are were sold through different channels under different licensing terms. The important variations today are between Retail, OEM, and Volume. A Retail/“full version” (usually bought off a store shelf) follows the owner, entitling him to a single Windows workstation. OEM licenses offer some marginal savings in return for the license following the hardware; factory OEM’s will flash a system’s key into the motherboard’s BIOS. Volume licenses are sold with bulk in mind; one key can activate as many installations as its organization paid for, but if individual computers are ever sold off, the license stays with the organization. Each of these classifications have multiple channels each as identified by a triplet of digits in the Product ID [1].
The main event this week is a software tool called NirSoft [2] that scans Windows’ registry (or a mounted installation of Windows) and extracts product ID’s and activation keys for both Windows and a small selection of other software. From the three readily available installations of XP, I recovered two OEM type keys and one 011 type (upgrade to XP Home Edition) [1]. Luckily, a matching upgrade CD recently turned up.
Takeaway
I counted four different ways I could pirate Windows XP with the tools I have. I may frown on Microsoft’s data-gobbling and competition crushing policies, but I respect them enough to keep it to name calling in unprofessional venues. Even if I did steal and post about it, I doubt it would be worth their time coming after me. I’m doing this 100% legit to the best of my ability, and I’d encourage anyone looking to make a similar VM to practice integrity as well.
Final Question
Unless I can also scrounge a retail Windows 95 or 98 disk + key, I can’t install XP fresh. My tentative plan therefore is to move the existing retail installation over to a VM and situate it with the matching CD I found. My one concern at the moment is weather the XP upgrade license overrides or augments whatever underlying license, which may be an unmovable OEM license. I don’t know if I can even tell. Am I safe to proceed?
Works Cited
[1] Lunarsoft Wiki, “Product IDs,” wiki.lunarsoft.net, Nov. 7, 2016. [Online]. Available:https://wiki.lunarsoft.net/wiki/Product_IDs. [Accessed June 19, 2023].
[2] N. Sofer, “NirSoft,” nirsoft.net, [Online]. Available:https://www.nirsoft.net/. [Accessed June 19, 2023].