Hello, I got new Laptop with Win 11 Home preinstalled, i want to have it for public use, but still have some features like Bitlocker, more privacy settings and hyper-V. Where i can safely get licenses for Windows 11 Pro or Enterprise or Edu without overpaying from official way?
I would not buy from a sketchy reseller.
Is massgrave safe place to get win11pro? Like i won’t get banned/blocked/bricked or anything like that? Anybody had expersiences?
Can’t say for sure but it’s open source, been around since ~2018/2019.
Here’s a thread about it.
You mean you want to buy the cheaper OEM keys from resellers where windows 11 pro costs around 10 to 20€, right?
I don’t want to pay ~100$ for new win11pro license in microsoft store. I can get it from that massgrave site, but i’m not sure if it is fully safe, like if it is suspicious to microsoft or not
Honestly, I heavily doubt that Microsoft cares that you can download Windows and activate it for free with a script. Massgrave is not a hidden service or some secret society; it is known and used by many. Its source code is literally hosted on GitHub, which Microsoft owns.
I think the ultimate goal of MS is to get you to use their OS in the first place and integrate you into their ecosystem so that they can receive your data through analytics, personal identifiers, Edge, etc. Licensing concerns usually lie with big companies that buy pricey corporate licenses, not with a random John Doe who doesn’t want to pay $100+ for a base Home edition of Windows.
This is exactly what I think so too.
Microsoft is (probably) deliberately leaving those Windiws piracy sites. The benefit of locking many people to Windows overweighs that of DMCAing all those sites and activation tools. And the huge amount of license fees actually come from enterprise solutions, where companies bulk register hundreds of Windows licenses together. Individual and personal pirating have relatively trivial impact.
It’s totally up to you whether to buy a genuine 100+$ authentic license directly from MS, or to use sites like massgrave, and use activation tools to use Windows (whatever edition you like) totally for free. In both cases, they take away your privacy through extremely invasive telemetry(GDID is a good example). The very fact that your PC has Windows installed already contributes to profitint of MS.
Regardless of the route of acquisition, I strongly recommend hardening the Windows installion through well known tools(preferably open source softwares like winhance, privacy-sexy, etc).
Don’t buy from unknown shady resellers. Though I don’t want to encourage piracy by any means, use either official MS store, or massgrave. You can manually compare the checksum.
In terms of privacy, Windows 10 and 11 Enterprise LTSC are the best. They are debloated by default. And Windows 10 does not have any AI features bundled. The enterprise LTSC for 10 still receives security updates unlike ordinary consumer editions. If you’re concerned about it being near EOL, Win 10 IoT edition is supported until 2032.
p.s. Use Veracrypt for FDE (if you intend to encrypt your drive). Bitlocker is proprietary, and was found to have a backdoor(named YellowKey) on Win11.