Last year when MS was offering upgrade Pro licenses for $40, I bought two, once for my desktop, one for a future laptop. I also did the same with the Media Center Pack upgrade. This gave me four keys, two for the Pro Upgrade, two for the Media Center Pack. I got my shiny new laptop yesterday, and it's running 8.0 Standard. I figured this is a great opportunity to wipe it out, and clean install with my extra keys, so following this thread (forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/47483-Windows-8-1-WMC-Creation-and-Activation-Guide) I created my 8.1 with WMC key and installed it. Now the dilemma. It won't accept either of my two keys. The $40 8Pro key, or the WMC Pack key. What is the simplest process with the least amount of upgrade steps to get this right? I really don't want to restore the laptop, upgrade to 8 Pro, upgrade to WMC, and then upgrade to 8.1. There has to be a more straightforward path!
Sadly, the amount of time it took to apply the WMC update was longer than it actually took to install 8.1 as a whole.
And now, after installing a bunch of drivers and getting it set up, I noticed that Windows is no longer activated.