A lot of people claim that Windows is easier to use than Linux and I think that is because they never had to install windows on their system as it is almost always preinstalled. Based on my experience it feels like Microsoft is almost trying to make sure that people pirate their software because their systems suck, especially their license activation process. Over the past few months I have spent almost 48+ hours trying to get my installation of Windows to accept my Windows Pro license key that is part of my MS account and yesterday I spent 6.3 hours on call with their support with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Some background, I purchased a license for Windows 10 Pro back in 2020 so that I have a fully functional windows system that I can use for my Testing and research. This was the second license key that I purchased for Windows 10 because the previous one I had that I got from Amazon was locked to my old computer and as per the support there was no way to migrate to a new system as it was not purchased from MS directly (Which is very strange and doesn’t make sense at all). So, they told me that I needed to get the license from their online store so that it would be associated with my MS account and that way it could be moved to a new computer without issues. (Yeah right!)
I got the license, used it on my old system for a bit and then switched to a new laptop. I unregistered the key from the old laptop and tried registering it on the new laptop. It absolutely refused to work. Even though it was connected to my MS Account and the license was being validated using the digital license it was still working as a Windows Home Single user.
Spoke to the support and while they were super nice they couldn’t solve the issue. We tried reinstalling, upgrading, other license keys but nothing worked. Got escalated to senior folks but same issue. I had just about given up and was actually considering just downloading a pirated copy as that would be easier to install when I thought I should give it one last try. So I reinstalled Windows again and then didn’t connect it to my online account, instead I tried changing the product key using the key given to me by the support team to upgrade and that finally worked. My copy of Windows finally was upgraded to Windows Pro. After that the system upgraded to the latest version that took forever and a ton of reboots.
The same issue is there in their other software, MS Teams refuses to open when you click on a meeting link in Firefox on your mobile, but when I copy the same like to Chrome it works. Why do I have to use Chrome when all it is doing is launching a native application when I click on the link. Other applications like Zoom, GotoMeeting etc manage to do this without issues, but MS with their super smart team of people have hard coded it to work only with Chrome/Edge. LinkedIn is another major mess and I will post about it in a different post as that is a long story as well.
You need to make it easy for users to install/register licensed software else if using pirated software is easier/faster then people will just use that. I mostly use open source products along with a few Linux licensed software but they are so much easier to use/register.
In any case I now have a licensed version of Windows Pro running after wasting days of my life trying to get it to work. Ask any end use to do registration and then they will feel differently about how easy Windows is to use.
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya