Many friends ask me to set up their new laptops and PC's so I'm creating a master disk image of a Windows 8 Core x64 edition (which is the one that manufacturers seem to use for home PC's) I will keep this up to date so I can then reimage any new laptop with my "prepared" image and save having to manually install everything like Classic Shell, all OS updates, MS Office and all settings etc etc.. I plan to enter the official key that comes with each new laptop and if necessary "reactivate" the new PC either online or by phone activation. I'm hoping by doing this I can use "my" prepared image and just enter the "official" key that comes with the new PC and succesfully one way or the other activate it. I haven't tried this method yet as none of my friends or relatives have bought a new Windows 8 PC. My question is:- 1. Will this method work? 2. The image I'm creating obviously isn't activated and keeps reminding me of the fact. What happens as the days and weeks go by.. will the activation nags increase or worse, will the unactivated "master" copy I'm keeping become unusable?
When i image Windows 7, i do it while it is unactivated and then i restore it 40-50 days later. What happens is that i see messages about Windows is not genuine but i just close it and get into desktop like usual and then just activate. I guess it is the same for Windows 8.
Just an update to say that my plan worked perfectly.. I created a master disk image (with ATI) of an MSDN Windows 8 Core x64 edition (which is the one that manufacturers seem to use for home PC's I've had) It contains all necessary software - M$ Office, utils, Classic Start Menu and tweaks etc etc. I keep this image current and updated then reimage any new Windows 8 Core laptop with my "prepared" image, find the key from the BIOS using the RW utility and voila it is legitimately activated. This way I can use "my" prepared image and save loads of time setting up a Windows 8 Core PC for friends and relatives.. It's a good system and it does work.
If this method indeed works, maybe you wouldn't mind writing a small tutorial so others can also try it for themselves? Thanks
You don't ever need to use -upk when you use -ipk, the new key will overwrite the old one, -upk is only there to uninstall the key from being read from registry (unable for software to read the key from registry, as it gets removed) but it's not removing the key from your system. To disable a Account you don't need some weird software but use "net user USERNAME /active:no" in a elevated CMD
Yes I know but you get the picture of what I'm trying to do! Windows 8 Manager has a heck of a lot of other tweaks I like too but hey it's a personal thing PS I edited my previous post for your pleasure..