What if You NEVER Activate Windows?

how's it going guys I'm Theo Joe 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 at Theo Joe 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 from 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 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 gonna 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 research 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 non activated versions of Windows but we'll get to that later so on to Windows 8 things are kind of similar to Windows 10 and that there's no grace period it's either one or the other activated or not activated 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 gonna see that little notification on the bottom right at 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 lockscreen 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 they will pop up and tell you hey you haven't 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 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 they'll 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 and system tray that is a prompt to activate windows but other than that you really wouldn't even notice next four days three through twenty seven you're going to get a daily popup 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 a 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 if 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 security 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 penalty's 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 released a manufacturer and then after Service Pack 1 it changed the penalties 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 interesting introduced in Vista and then kind of polished and 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 noticed but the third one definitely 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 1 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 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 into do 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 gonna 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 gonna be the same reason why they pretty much just let you use 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 they're 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 a 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 gonna pirate Windows and they're not going to buy our hundred dollar 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 orders to be Windows everyone will be using Windows and 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 gonna happen but it's possible so I think that pretty much answers it if you're not gonna 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 and make a couple of new videos a week should be worth it and it 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

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 1,505,904

Keywords: technology, tech, activate windows, windows activation, genuine windows, windows not activated, windows not genuine, windows 10, windows 7, microsoft windows, windows, windows 8, microsoft, computer, operating system

Id: 8bJrWrTSHvY

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019