Did I burn a Win7 activation?

[Gonad the Barbarian]

I have a retail copy, have done a few upgrades since the the initial activation, but hadn't been prompted to reactivate before. But today I'm playing around with a new wifi adapter, and in the process disabling my NIC in the device manager a few times switch back and forth, and after one of these times I get the message that my copy of Windows needed to be reactivated and would be done automatically in three days. At this point I'm kind of irked and tempted to restore a disk image, but I unplug the wifi adapter and re-enable my NIC and look in my system info and now it says Windows is activated. So did it burn through an activation without prompting me again? I still have fond memories of going through phone activations on XP so I was hoping not to burn through my activation allowances with this copy.

 

[ViRGE]

Probably. But it's a retail copy so MS has to activate it regardless.

 

[imagoon]

Not likely. When you turned the NIC back on the hardware hash likely matched again and Windows was happy.

 

[JackMDS]

This type of activation notification usually comes with Win 7 Enterprise.

Is this is the case?



😎

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

This is a legit copy of Home Premium. I was surprised at getting the notification at all since I wasn't actually changing any hardware. I looked at the files to supposedly back up to preserve an activation over onto a fresh install, and token.dat was last modified a few days ago, probably when I first plugged in my wifi adapter, and my pkeyconfig files were last modified last year when I first activated. So unless there are other files that hold the activation info somewhere it looks like it didn't actually go through another reactivation process.