Question buying laptop w/o Operating System

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rosycreates

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Jun 4, 2022
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I am considering the purchase of a Lenovo on ebay that needs an OS. Since I have the windows 10 installation usb, will I need to have a win10 license? I understand that the motherboard or BIOS has that encrypted on it somewhere? Is it the same way as booting into BIOS, choosing the USB as the boot drive, restart, then install....What needs to be done in this scenario please? TIA!
I did try searching. But couldnt find anything with this particular question....
 

Etrius vanRandr

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Thank you for explaining SLIC to me. It helps a great deal. I had not heard of it.

Debates happen 😀

We shall see what happens when I receive the Lenovo..hopefully by the end of the week.

S l i c is just a partition in the bios that the operating system can look for that contains the Windows key itself. Sometimes it's encrypted and sometimes it's not. The last time I had explicit experience with an slic key was a little Dell optiplex 7010 running Windows 8 pro that I downgraded to Windows 7 pro and I didn't have to reactivate it myself.
 
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Etrius vanRandr

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Enterprise keys are Volume license only and it is a contract/eula violation for them to be sold/used outside of the organization that bought them. When the seller eventually gets busted all those keys will be voided.

Okay and Microsoft pumps out out billions of keys a year. Like I said just get a new one, 15 + 15 is 30 and 30 is less than 100.

and if it turns out to be real problem just get a legitimate key it's a hundred bucks it's not that expensive. Some people are just poor don't want to hsell out a hundred bucks for a legitimate key when there are plenty of free or cheap activation options available.

there's no point in pretending to have the moral high ground here I know all of you are guilty of something but I'm not going to put it here on the forum.

I also know for a fact that some of the Tom's servers are using illegitimate keys. so if you really want to challenge me on this you should probably fix that first. Specifically the third and fifth content delivery clusters
 

Etrius vanRandr

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you got proof for this?

Well the real answer is a violation of the forum rules so I'm not even going to bother. You've been given information so do something with it

This entire discussion has been on the border of breaking the rules and being a legitimate discussion so I'm not going to tempt fate since I enjoy being here.

I've had three moderators show up to try to "set me on the correct path" if you will, @USAFRet has the right idea of leaving the conversation in the very beginning since he knows exactly how the conversation is going to end.
 

Etrius vanRandr

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but I don't have any proof. so just go by your word? that not enough for anyone.

You said contact the admin so I'll go ahead and do that. You should just Lock this thread cuz there's no point in the back and forth about legitimate and illegitimate keys as every single tech support form has had this discussion at some point or another with myself and plenty of other users who are way smarter than me.

Users have options and they're allowed to choose whatever option they like. I know Tom's does not support or condone illegitimate keys nor do they provide support for people with illegitimate keys.

I was merely making the user aware that they have the option if they so choose it.
 
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