I am a software developer and recently purchased a Windows 7 Home Premium license and media labeled as "Intended for distribution with a refurbished PC".  Does the license allow installation in a virtual machine for my personal use?  See also:
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I plan on buying Windows 7 Ultimate Edition to run on an old Pentium 4. I also want to run Windows 7 virtual machines inside Windows 7. My question is two fold:   Do I need a license for each Virtual Machine? Does the answer change if I use a third party virtualization platform (e.g. , , , etc) as opposed to ?
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We are experimenting with running an OpenVPN server for our business. One question I can't seem to find the answer to is this:  When we generate keys for one of our users for them to use at home, can their use the same keys on their home laptop as well as their home desktop? Or do we need to generate separate keys for each user's client machine?
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I have just performed a fresh installation of Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit on my lenovo e330 laptop. I managed to successfully download and install most of its drivers, but still, a "PCI Device" appears under "other devices" in the device manager.  What could it be? How can I check what is missing?
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I am currently running 8.1. I'd like to try out Windows 10 and if I like it upgrade. If not, I'll keep running as I am.   I've never used a virtual machine before: can Window 10 be used from a virtual machine as a "sandbox", and if so how?
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A while ago I turned my PC into dual boot with Windows and Ubuntu. But my experience is, that I rarely boot into Ubuntu, so I wanted to make it available as virtual machine in Windows rather than as a second OS. Can you provide me some information which is the tool of my choice and how I can achieve this migration? I already have VMWare Player installed.
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Long story short  I have two computers: a laptop and a desktop computer. Both have Windows 7 on them.  I buy the Windows 8 Pro upgrade. To see if it screws up anything, I install it on my laptop as a guinea pig. I intend to use Windows 8 for my main computer, my desktop, but I want to test it on the laptop, so I know I don’t risk losing access to my desktop and the data on it. I never use my laptop, and only used it, because it already has a Windows 7 installation on it.  The problem  At some point, I must have entered the license key on my laptop, because when I go to the activation screen on my desktop, I get this:    Uh-oh. I can’t use the key on my desktop. Now how the hell do I transfer the key from my laptop to my desktop computer?  Answers and suggestions so far  Let’s just say that I tried everything possible to get some answers on this matter. The best response I got from Microsoft is this:     To install Windows 8 on your desktop, do the following:         Uninstall Windows 8 on your laptop   Afterwards, install Windows 8 on your desktop   If it won’t activate, call product activation at (...)      I am not a fan of that last point. The error message does allude to such a solution, however:     If you’ve reinstalled Windows or made changes to your hardware recently, you may be able to use your current key.   The question  My main question is this: has anyone been in a similar situation, and if so, what did you do to resolve this?  Failing that, what is the proper way to   uninstall the Windows 8 installation on my laptop, and reinstall the Windows 8 installation on my desktop?   Ad 1  I have already tried using the “reset” feature on my laptop, but that only resulted in a new Windows 8 installation that was already activated. But which is the right way to uninstall the installation in a way that allows me to use the license key on the desktop computer?  Ad 2  Which is the proper way to reinstall the Windows 8 installation on my desktop computer? Why do I even have to reinstall it in the first place?  I won’t get around to do this, until my USB key with 3.0 support arrives in the mail, but it is going to be a while, until I find a assuaging response to the best way to go about this anyway.
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I have been a Linux user after switching from Windows 98 and never looked back. However, a friend asked me to set up their brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad with Windows 10. I was totally startled at how terrible the out-of-the-box UX is. Adware all over the place and no luck getting rid of it the gentle way.  So, this question is not about removing adware per se, but about getting a clean install of Windows 10 going. The two things I'm hesitant about are:   Where do I get an ISO image for Windows 10? Where do I find the OEM license key? Back in the day they used to put stickers on the machines.
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As I understand it, OEM computers that come with Windows 8 preinstalled has the license/product key stored in the BIOS/on the motherboard somewhere.   If you do a clean install (*) of Windows 8 (for example with an ISO from MSDN) on an computer which came preinstalled with Windows 8, will it recognize that it already has a license? Or will it require you to purchase a new Windows 8 license to activate it?  (And excuse me if I have the terms confused, hopefully the meaning comes across.)    (*) Wiping the drive, perhaps because it has been corrupted in some way and ordinary recovery/repair is impossible.
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I am writing an article comparing three pieces of software. I have taken screen shots of all of them and would like to use them in a non-open access article. Given the intended journal, there is a reasonable chance of the images being on the cover. What are the copyright issues associated with screen shots?  Specifically, one of the pieces of software is free and open source (GPL v2), and two are free as in beer, but closed source with unknown licenses and no EULAs. To further complicate matters one of the closed sourced pieces of software looks and functions very much like a proprietary piece of hardware produced by a massive company. Three years ago I contacted the developer of the software and asked about using a screen shot and he said it was fine. The software is still widely available, but the direct download from the developers site now has text indicating that the massive company has "requested" that it be taken down. I own the physical hardware and am not aware of any crazy licensing restrictions. I could use a photo of the physical hardware if that is better.
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It would seem that there should be web resources to quickly find an answer to this question but I couldn't find any, so I'm trying my luck here.   I used the Win10 Media Creation Tool to download Win10 Pro ISO's and set up VM's I use for testing before deploying to bare metal. Once I deploy, I do so with a digital license or product key but it obviously doesn't make any sense activating while in the (temporary) VM.   Now I noticed that my VM still works, and it's been many weeks since I first used it. It's not activated, of course, but I can still log in and install software and so on.   Up until now, I always created a new VM installation from scratch when I needed to do testing. It would naturally save me some time if I could just install it once and then clone when I need a new environment (that will eventually be licensed). I thought that's not possible due to some time restraints so I didn't even try it.   Hence my questions:    Is there an official "evaluation period" for Windows 10, and how long is it?  How long can one use (from a technical perspective only) a not activated copy of Windows 10?  Which limitations are there for a not activated copy and when do they step into effect? I was, for example, not able to confirm that personalization is not possible as seems to have been the case with a not-activated Windows 8.  (See comment on answer below.)
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The company that I work for continuously hires new people, and I'm the one who has to go and purchase new computers.  The majority of them, if not all, come pre-installed with Windows Home editions.  I'm noticing that the Windows 7/8 Home editions are unable to connect to domains.  I'm having to buy the upgrades to the Pro editions.  I'm trying to understand as to why the Home edition of the OS is unable to connect to domains?
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I just did a fresh Window 10 installation from .iso files on the computer I was running Windows 7 on before. I have the original Windows 7 DVD's, with a valid key that I was using before.  Now I tried to enter the key of my Windows 7 DVD, but Windows 10 says it's not valid.  As far as I knew we were able to use those Win 7 keys on Win 10. What is wrong?
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Do you have tips or a guide how to install Ubuntu in Microsoft Virtual PC?  I have found some (older) information, but I wonder if this is still valid. And it looks very "unfriendly".
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I have followed these steps to install windows 7 home premium x64 on a 3tb drive (asus z87-z motherboard):    In the console window, diskpart, I ran:  select disk &lt;disk number&gt; clean convert gpt   Then when using the GUI to partition the disk to install windows, it always reverts back to MBR (list disk shows no asterisk under gpt).  I tried again, in this case cleaning and converting the disk, then pointing windows at the partitioned disk and letting it install.   By going to Control Panel-Administrative tools-Computer Managment-Storage-Disk Managementand checking the properties of the disk I can see that it is now a MBR.  Is there something I have missed? Could there be something in my setup incompatible with GPT that is causing this?
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My company is in the process of upgrading all of our users from old Windows XP computers to newer quad-core Win7 computers.  This is a good thing - it's long overdue that we upgrade our workstations - but I now spend a ton of time configuring new computers.  Is there any way to automate this process?  The steps that I go through with just about every computer:   Run through Win7 setup process (we do mostly HPs, so we get the stupid "The computer is personal again" thing.   Uninstall bloatware (norton, bing bar, roxio, etc.) Install Updates Add to domain &amp; configure network settings Install Office, and other company-specific applications Configure important shortcuts (Outlook on task bar)   There's a couple other things that I do after that that would be nice to automate, but it's unlikely due to license keys, passwords, etc.   Configure Outlook Pull in files/settings with easy transfer wizard Map network drives   I know that it's possible to create a complete image of a computer, but how does that work with different hardware/drivers?  What about Win7 license keys?  If there is a way to make this work, what is the best (preferably free/open source) software out there to do this?
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I recently purchased an ASUS N56VZ-ES71 laptop which came with Windows 7 Home Premium installed on it. I wish to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 on it. I shrank the hard drive partitions to leave about 150 GB unallocated for Ubuntu 12.04. When I boot the Live CD of Ubuntu and attempt to install, the installer does not recognize any other operating systems. Through reading a few questions, I have found that this is due to a GPT partitioning table that Windows uses.  I ran boot-repair as per other threads' suggestions. This was my output:   I suppose my question is: how do I proceed in order to get the installer to recognize Windows, so that I don't have to erase the current partition table and can get a safe install?  Thanks in advance.
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We get a lot of questions on Super User about Windows activation and licensing. This question is an attempt to answer the most common questions in one place with a .   When reinstalling Windows, the following questions often come up:   Can I transfer the copy of Windows from my old computer to a new one? Does the license key on the sticker on my computer work on any computer? If I have a 32-bit version, can I install a 64-bit version? I have an OEM version of Windows, but only a retail disk. Can I still use it? I want to install Windows with a different language. Do I need a new license in that language? I changed some hardware. Will I be able to reactivate my computer? Can I back up my activation before doing a reinstall? How many computers can I install my license on? Do I have to deactivate my old installation before transferring a license? If so, how? How does licensing work in Windows ? What are the restrictions on transferring, reinstalling, and changing versions of Windows?