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Product activation is a license validation procedure required by some proprietary software programs. Product activation prevents unlimited free use of copied or replicated software. Unactivated software refuses to fully function until it determines whether it is authorized to fully function. Activation allows the software to stop blocking its use.
On Windows 10 and Windows 11, the activation process can also generate a "digital entitlement", which allows the operating system's hardware and license status to be saved to the activation servers, so that the operating system's license can automatically be restored after a clean installation without the need to enter a product key.
At the time of launch, Microsoft deemed Windows 7 (with Service Pack 1) and Windows 8.1 users eligible to upgrade to Windows 10 free of charge, so long as the upgrade took place within one year of Windows 10's initial release date. Windows RT and the respective Enterprise editions of Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 were excluded from this offer.
Windows 10 is the last version of Microsoft Windows that supports 32-bit processors (IA-32 and ARMv7-based), the last non-IoT edition to officially lack a CPU whitelist [30] and support BIOS firmware, [31] [32] and the last version to officially support systems with TPM 1.2 or without any TPM at all.
Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of computer software operating systems created by Microsoft.Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
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Windows 8 (also sometimes referred to as Windows 8 (Core) to distinguish from the OS itself) [2] is the basic edition of Windows for the IA-32 and x64 architectures. This edition contains features aimed at the home market segment and provides all of the basic new Windows 8 features.