Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Gadgets & Tech Product Key Nightmare - Any Ideas?

Those are temporary activation keys that have been killed off.

All the windows product keys I use are belong to licenses that I have bought. No point in using ones that are going to die at a later date.

Progress has been made, after a wee chat to Microsoft I have one of my product keys re-instated, Windows 7 has now been installed and activated, just waiting for over 200 updates to install then I'll upgrade again to Windows 10.

Waited 7 hours for Windows update to come back and say there were no updates yesterday, then today 218 updates have popped up on the first pass. Windows update was showing 0k download but 206 started to install on shutting down.

I think they are messing Windows 7 users around to convince them to use Windows 10.

Just about got this sorted, Windows 7 updates locked up twice, failed once (and un-installed 80% of the updates) then Windows 10 setup update locked up twice but Windows 10 is now up, running and authenticated. Just a small problem that zonealarm a+f doesn't install properly and doesn't even properly warn that its not completed, I think Windows Defender is blocking it. Zonealarm and Windows defender are supposed to be Windows 10 compliant and the handover should run smoothly as it has the numerous other times I've done it, maybe something to do with the latest updates

I would prefer now to do a clean install but I haven't got the bottle to go through another 3 days of faffing around if it goes wrong again.

Zonealarm? Not used that in years.

Zonealarm is one of the best, went out of fashion for a while partly due to a few mistakes as did most of the security softwares, the difference was that zonealarm picked their feet up and have been almost impeccable since. Their partnership with kaspersky has worked out very well.

People don't understand how the economic/business model of freeware works and so think its no good because its free but the figures say it all CLICKY inside the top 1000 companies for profit and market value.

I've only ever had one thing slip through zonealarm and it was undetected by everything else as well (including malwarebytes) I found it but there was no information on the net - I spotted it by fluke because it had a filename that popped up in a directory name search that I had programmed incorrectly, its location and name were very suspicious and obviously designed not to be found. Zonealarm detected it two days later, others were still not detecting it months later.

The free version has got limited amount of user control but more than enough for someone that isn't prepared to adjust settings manually on a regular basis.

Avira is ridiculously slow when you switch on all the options which are necessary for reasonable protection.

AVG I gave up on with ongoing compatibility problems for years on end.

Norton was a joke, slow and useless

McAfee went from one of the best to one of the worst, three different infections sailed through in a month at work.

Some of these have possibly picked up their performance by now but until zonealarm lets me down I have no reason to look around.

This new update there rolling out (Nov 2015) is supposed to fix a lot of activations issues and also relax on many that were blocked.

Yes, that is what the link I put up stated, however it still didn't work.

The difference was that on entering the product key it didn't fail on a local check as the older versions did, it interrogated the remote Microsoft database and then failed it.

My suspicions are that somehow the product key had been registered against the wrong version of Windows 10 - perhaps someone else had used it from a keygen or whatever.

There are at least four versions of Windows 10 home ...

Windows 10 home
Windows 10 home N
Windows 10 home KN
Windows 10 home single language

While its easy to find out what version of Windows 7 the product key belonged to there is no method to find out what version of Windows 10 it has been registered with on the Microsoft Database other than trial and error (ie hairloss)