Windows 8 Activation Fail
Jun 7, 2013
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Unlike Apple’s outstanding OS X onboarding experience, Microsoft really have to step up the Windows onboarding. When you charge a lot of money for people to use your OS and require them to activate it, the activation must work. Sadly, it doesn’t.
I use an MSDN Windows 8 distribution. When I try to activate it in the (limited) Metro app, I get this:
Clicking the Activate button doesn’t help, though. If you do, you just get a dead progress spinner:
Obviously, this Metro app will not help you out, so let’s activate Windows from the Control Panel instead. Open it, search for “activat” and select “Action Center/Windows Activation”.
Sadly, this view is as useless as the Metro app. Click Activate and you’re taken to a progress bar dialog, that ends up in…
This is just ridiculous. How can Microsoft fail so completely with such a critical part of the onboarding? How can you create a software that you have to activate, that can’t be activated? It may be by design, but I have a feeling that things are rotten in the Microsoft UX basket.
Don’t worry - activation is just a blog post away. When searching the world wide web, I stumbled upon this article regarding activation.
What the article basically suggests, are two options for activating Windows 8:
- Search for, and run
Slui.exe 0x3 - Run
Cscript.exe %windir%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk <Your product key>
This should work. I just can’t even begin to understand how this can be. How the hell can this ever get released? Who in the MS organization decided to ignore this key-feature? Who? Why!? Gaaaah!