Windows 8 Activation Fail
Unlike Apple’s great OS X onboarding experience, The Windows onboarding is horrible. If you charge money to use your OS, activation must work. Too bad, it doesn’t.
I use an MSDN Windows 8 distribution. When I try to activate it in the Metro app, I get this:
Clicking Activate 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 “activate” and pick “Action Center/Windows Activation”.
Sadly, this is as useless as the Metro app. Click Activate and you get a progress dialog that ends up in a “Windows couldn’t be activated” error:
This is ridiculous! How can Microsoft fail this hard with such an important onboarding step? Something is rotten in the Microsoft UX basket.
Don’t worry - activation is just a blog post away. When searching the web, I stumbled upon this article regarding activation.
The article basically suggests two options for activating Windows 8:
- Search for, and run
Slui.exe 0x3 - Run
Cscript.exe %windir%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk <Your product key>
I just can’t even begin to understand how this can be. How can this ever get released? Who in the MS organization decided to ignore this key-feature? Who? Why!? Gaaaah!