First time, I had an HP laptop with Windows XP Pro OEM in 2006. All worked fine, but one day out of the blue it told me that my copy of Windows wasn't genuine. I don't know what caused it & reinstalling Windows over the top from DVD didn't fix it. I seem to recall Windows then kept shutting down after 2 hours, so backing up my data before a reformat was extremely difficult. Once I reformatted & did a clean reinstall, it worked again.
The second time, I had a MS BizSpark membership via the Association Of Software Professionals, and was testing my software in Windows 7 VMs. 8 months later, my Windows 7 claimed it was non-genuine. I enquired with Microsoft, and they said my business shouldn't have been eligible for BizSpark because it was more than 3 years old, so they'd cancelled the BizSpark membership & blacklisted my Windows keys without notifying me. I would've preferred if MS verified my eligibility upfront.
I switched to Apple as a result. I know, it's another proprietary OS and tied to one hardware vendor, but at least in 9 years it has never locked me out of my data or my machine.
First time, I had an HP laptop with Windows XP Pro OEM in 2006. All worked fine, but one day out of the blue it told me that my copy of Windows wasn't genuine. I don't know what caused it & reinstalling Windows over the top from DVD didn't fix it. I seem to recall Windows then kept shutting down after 2 hours, so backing up my data before a reformat was extremely difficult. Once I reformatted & did a clean reinstall, it worked again.
The second time, I had a MS BizSpark membership via the Association Of Software Professionals, and was testing my software in Windows 7 VMs. 8 months later, my Windows 7 claimed it was non-genuine. I enquired with Microsoft, and they said my business shouldn't have been eligible for BizSpark because it was more than 3 years old, so they'd cancelled the BizSpark membership & blacklisted my Windows keys without notifying me. I would've preferred if MS verified my eligibility upfront.
I switched to Apple as a result. I know, it's another proprietary OS and tied to one hardware vendor, but at least in 9 years it has never locked me out of my data or my machine.