Windows is weird.

This is mainly for business owners. Who can afford it.

It was offered on other OSes as well.

But it does not last forever, as those staff have to move on, and patch other things. For Enterprise users, this is a way to cover tardy organizations who are slow to change. (And they have good reason to be tardy, when a change of OS versions costs them $100,000,000 all-in costs.)

Paul

And the price for ESU doubles every year ...

Yup, you can extract that with produkey:

On many windows 10 boxes, if you try downloading/installing/using produkey, Windows security reports a PUA, Potentially Unwanted app and that a threat called Win32 presenoker has been found......

I have seen that personally, but ISTR that Nir has mentioned problems in the past:

In a related vein:

I have two DVDs both with RETAIL Windows 7 Ultimate on it. They were installed on two separate machines and I still have the two Windows 7 Ultimate DVD keys.

Both were upgraded free to Window 10 professional by MS. During the install, MS issued windows 10 digital licences on both machines which are completely different to the original Windows 7 ultimate keys.

One of the machines has since been replaced. I downloaded a Windows 10 ISO from MS directly and it accepted one of the Windows 7 Ultimate keys. The resulting Windows 10 digital key is again unrelated to the original windows 7 ultimate key.

I now have a new machine and wish to do the same using the OTHER Windows

However, how do I work out which one of the two WIndows 7 ultimate keys was used on the first machine so that I can use the other key on the new machine?

S.

Slight correction : "*not* seen it personally"

Yup par for the course these days it seems. Even if you install office from a product key card, the key it records on the MS account bears no resemblance to the one used to install it.

You probably can't - however it will allow you to change the key later, so try one, and if it does not work try the other. Chances are if its been a while since the last install either would work anyway.

MS are still producing updates for win 7 since there is the option for enterprise customers to pay for updates for a further year or so. These won't however be rolled out to non corporate users via windows update.

Generally they do. However in some limited cases when they are thought to be serious enough that they will impact users of *other* supported platforms, then they may choose to publish a win 7 update. They don't do this for most updates.

Indeed. There are several others, but I like ProductKey. IIRC, it's portable, so you can run it off a memory stick.

Yep, I was searching an external 4TB drive the other day and Defender objected when it saw the produkey installer in a download folder

"HackTool:Win32/ProductKey!MTB"

In article <$ snipped-for-privacy@marfordfarm.demon.co.uk>, Tim Lamb snipped-for-privacy@marfordfarm.demon.co.uk> writes

Stay on W7, then you don't have any issues with updates.

Yes, it would. And why shouldn't they? Surely it would have been possible to improve the coding totally behind the scenes while keeping the front end untouched, and offer that as an alternative upgrade?

I agree. Upgrade the engine without putting the accelerator on the ceiling and the clutch behind the back seat!

In other words, accept that people have developed muscle memory and the ability to do many tasks instinctively without having to think them through every time. MS got it very badly wrong with Win 8, in that they got rid of the conventional Start menu altogether, and replaced with the "mess of tiles" which are not all the same size, don not stay in the same place and do not use the full-colour icons that the applications themselves have. They also devised a new windowing style (Metro) which didn't even have minimise/maximise/close buttons at the top right - you were expected to swipe a mouse as if you were swiping your finger over a touch screen.

It was as if they were expecting everyone who used a mouse and keyboard to change to the touchscreen metaphor.

They rectified things a bit with Windows 10, in that at least there is a Start menu of sorts. But there is still the confusion over whether things like printers should be configured using the new cut-down Settings menu or the older, more fully-functional Control Panel applets.

The fundamental problem was that they sought to *remove* old functionality when they introduced new functionality, instead of saying "here are two ways of configuring Windows - the old way and the new way - and it is up to

The other problem with MS is that their email program changed with every version of WIndows: Outlook Express (XP), Windows Mail (Vista), Windows Live Mail (7), Mail (8 and 10). They should have allowed all their email programs to work with all versions of Windows, just as third-party email programs like Thunderbird (email/news) and Firefox/Chrome (browser) are Windows-independent. And they should not have withdrawn the ability to download WLM if you need to reinstall a Win 7 PC. Outlook (the Office package, not the email platform (*) suffers from a) not having Usenet capabilities, b) saving all messages to one humungous file (instead of one file per folder or one per message) which means a multi-GB file must be rewritten every time you backup your email, c) not using OE's, WM's and WLM's IAF file for exporting email configuration (servers, ports, password) from one PC to another. Mail is a toy, with very much reduced functionality. For me, neither Outlook nor Mail does the job, so I'd go for Thunderbird on Win10.

(*) Which numpty decided to hijack the existing name Outlook (for the Office email package) and reuse it, without even killing off Outlook package, as the email platform?

The reason the UI changed is to handle touch screens.

That is a reason to design an new *additional* UI. It is most emphatically not a reason to kill off the old UI and force users of mouse-driven PCs to adopt the lower-spec UI of a tablet.

Apart from adding additional security measures, there's not much maintenance required: it worked on XP, so it should work on all future versions of Windows until they manage to produce a *replacement* mail client - and I mean one that is as fully-functioned, not a stripped-down client like Mail. At a pinch, I'd say OE and WM could have been dropped, leaving just WLM (though its Calendar applet is nowhere near as good as the one in Windows Mail). But they should not have withdrawn it and replaced it with Mail, which is a pathetic little toy.

I use my phone for brief messages, but a touch screen where the keys are far smaller than the size of your finger does not lend itself to typing more than the absolute minimum.

Its not feasible to do it that way, most obviously with the panes.

Wrong when you can still the mouse fine with the new UI.

But why should touch screens be regarded as the standard to which all other types of PCs must conform?

Why not offer touch screen based OS for those who need or want one and something more conventional and familiar for those who don't?