Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   ArtG
   Member

   If I upgrade from Windows 10 Professional to Windows 11 will I lose all my GiveAwayOfTheDay licenses (and all my other third party software both free and bought)?

   When I upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 10 Professional all my GiveAwayOfTheDay software stopped working. I think all the licenses became invalid. Anyway they would no longer run. I also had to reinstall all my third party software. Finally, the some software I bought on eBay, lile Microsoft Office 16 also stopped running.

   Will the same thing happen if I upgrade to Windows 11? Has anybody actually actually had any experiece of this?[i][u]

   I also think I lost a lot of third party software (including GiveAwayOfTheDay software offerings) when I had to do a complete new installation of Windows 10 Professional.

   I've installed an awful lot of GiveAwayOfTheDay and BitsDuJour software over the last five years on my Windows 10 machine as well as a lot of freeware, some eBay software and some paid for software.

   I don't want to lose all of this. Unfortunately, my Windows 10 has gotten very buggy, Windows Update has a 'pending install' bug I can't fix as of yet and another bug is stopping me downloading M/S Visual Studio which I need for an AI OCR project.

   My thanks in advance for your advice and suggestions.

   I'm running Windows 10 Professional on a Dell Precision T7910 workstation

   Eff Windows and Microsoft.

   Posted 4 weeks ago #
2. 

   ChrisS
   Administrator

   The upgrade should keep the existing licenses intact. However, some of your older programs may not be compatible with Windows 11.

   Posted 4 weeks ago #
3. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   Per Dell the T7910 workstation runs a Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3

   dell[.]com/en-my/shop/cty/pdp/spd/precision-t7910-workstation

   It does not appear that CPU is officially supported for Win11

   learn.microsoft[.]com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-intel-processors

   That's not a terribly big deal, though you'll want to download a Win11 ISO & then use Rufus to write it to a USB stick. During that process Rufus will turn off hardware checking.

   microsoft[.]com/en-us/software-download/windows11

   rufus[.]ie

   Optional...
   You *might* want to perform a disk image backup to another internal or external drive. You also *might* want to perform a repair install of Win10, by running setup on a mounted Win10 ISO while Win10 is running. If you do, run Disk Cleanup afterwards [from the properties window for the Windows drive in File Explorer] to get rid of any junk, including the windows.old folder if it exists. The reason for a repair install is that it might fix stuff, and the better shape Win10 is in, the better shape a new install of Win11 will be, since it will migrate everything that exists in Win10. Upgrading to Win11 *should* clean up the registry, but the less junk there is in Win10's registry the better the result upgrading. The reason for a backup is in case the upgrade does not work for some reason -- restoring the backup will put things back exactly as they were. A 2ndary reason is if some critical software doesn't make it into Win11 still registered, you can restore Win10 to another drive or partition, use EasyBCD to add it to the boot menu, and boot into Win10 instead of Win11 to run that software. AOMEI has a free version of their Backupper software and Hasleo offers a free image backup app as well.

   Software...
   Chris is 100% correct, all of your existing software should be migrated, including its activation. You *might* have to experiment with the compatibility settings on some apps -- in File Explorer right click the .exe file that runs the app, click properties, then the compatibility tab. Where the registration data for each app is stored varies. It might be included in a file, usually in the program's folder, the Users folders, ProgramData, or Windows. Or it might be in the registry. If an app is migrated but not activated you *might* be able to find the necessary file in Windows.old, which stores all the files to revert back to Win10. More complicated [Google for directions] you can also mount a Win10 backup image [if you created one], then mount its registry in Regedit, exporting any needed keys, then merging them into Win11's registry. Generally though, you should not have to bother. Some software creates and uses a hardware ID, but since you're not changing your hardware that ID should stay the same. If the upgrade process skips an app for some reason, you should be able to find it in Windows.old too. Copy paste the folder(s) to their normal locations and hopefully it'll work -- remember you might have to tweak the compatibility settings.

   Posted 3 weeks ago #
4. 

   ArtG
   Member

   Thanks for your insightful comments and suggestions. I very much appreciate them. Good to know that upgrading will not result in loss of my third party and free software.

   Amazingly the update worked after failing many times before. My PC seems to have survived intact and Command line sfc and dism are not reporting any errors. There were of course annoying changes of the kind you expect from Microsoft. My Office settings, for example, were all reset for example. So were my settings for saving files in several other programs. I also had to reinstall my VPN program. The third party software and the programs that use most often that downloaded from GiveAwayOfTheDay and similar websites are all working.

   Regarding Dell and Windows 11. Yes, last time I looked Windows 11 is not compatible with the T7910 CPU. However, Dell has instructions on how to install Windows 11 on the T7910. Some extra steps I think, but it should be straight forward and unproblematic. I’ll probably go ahead and do it when I have a moment.

   Another question. I’ve found that some of the programs that I’ve downloaded from GiveAwayOfTheDay, BitsDuJour and SharewareOnSale that were presented as having life-time licenses are now unlicensed when I open them. These programs are ones that I have either not used since I downloaded them or only rarely use. When open these programs they either offer a trial or request purchase.

   Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I downloaded these programs from. Ascomp seems to be a frequent offender. I have quite a few of their programs and I think I downloaded them all from BitsDuJour. I very much doubt that I messed up registration. These days where I can I check the status of the license after I install it.

   I’m curious. Has GiveAwayOfTheDay had any experience of software that purported to offer lifetime licenses but then default on their promise?

   Thanks again for your advice and suggestions. Much appreciate your time and effort.

   Posted 3 weeks ago #
5. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   Yeah, sometimes apps lose their activation. *Sometimes* if you store the key you used in a text file in the app's folder you can use that key to reactivate the software, but most of the time I've tried that it did not work.

   When software is activated it can store the key that was used using lots of different methods. The simplest is probably storing that info in a file in the program's folder -- program starts, checks that file, and you're good to go. At the opposite end of the spectrum the software will determine an at least partially hardware-based key, store that and any activation data in a few places, then have the app contact the company's servers with all that info whenever it's started to get an OK, registration's still good.

   The more complicated the process determining if an app is registered, the more that can go wrong. Something can change so the machine ID no longer matches the ID the software originally created. Files &/or registry entries can be deleted. It's probably rare, but software from the same company but installed at a later date may have used the same file name for the file storing the activation info, overwriting an earlier activation. The same can happen in the registry, e.g., SoftOrbits uses the same base key for several apps.

   For apps that contact the company's servers to determine if they're registered or not, the software company can also turn off activation -- it's happened before, and several companies state when they have a giveaway that if the giveaway keys start wildly circulating on the web they'll turn them off. I would guess that at some point they could also turn off activation routines on their servers for apps &/or versions that have not been supported for a long while, or old activation routines might disappear after they update their servers.

   Posted 2 weeks ago #

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