Gadgetory

it used to be that you absolutely had to pay big money to use Windows even to just install it but crazily enough these days anyone can download a completely free Windows 10 disk image directly from Microsoft as part of the company's push to get as many people on its latest operating system as possible and believe it or not it'll actually work just like a regular old copy of Windows 10 that you pay for with a couple of exceptions first personalization features like changing your wallpaper will be disabled and second you'll get an annoying watermark in the corner of your screen reminding you to cough up some dough and activate Windows so let's say that you've just finished building your system then and you find these two annoyances just far too much to tolerate so you ran up your browser to go buy a Windows license only to find that most online retailers want a hundred bucks or even more just for an OEM product key remember that's the one that comes with no support and that can't be transferred to a new machine understandably you feel like this is a massive ripoff and you begin your search for cheaper alternatives and lo and behold you find a few online marketplaces that are selling Windows Keys for less than 20 bucks great deal right oh well maybe not just like anything that's 80% off deeply discounted Windows Keys do come with some question marks because for one thing it's nearly impossible to know exactly where these keys came from oftentimes the marketplaces that do actually say something about the source of these keys will tell you that they're simply reselling extra keys from wholesalers but what does that mean I mean last time I went to Costco the bin of extra Windows Keys was notably absent so then as it turns out many of these keys are actually coming from volume licenses this means that the key was one of many that were sold to a large business or organization at a lower bulk price but the issue here is that Microsoft doesn't officially allow these keys to be resold due to the significant discounts that they initially offered others might have originally been free or heavily discounted keys that are offered to university students or even simply keys that were purchased legitimately but in a different part of the world for a lower price to reflect the lower earning power of the people who live there so none of that stuff actually sounds that bad does it I'd say it's all kind of gray at best but you can run into more serious issues as well many times these keys have actually been purchased with a stolen credit or debit card then flipped at an extraordinarily low price before the original credit cards owner wises up because after all if a thief originally got the key for free then they're gonna come out way ahead even if they're only charging 15 bucks for it and I don't know about you but knowingly accepting stolen goods even if you did pay for them here in Canada anyway is illegal anyway though let's assume you don't want to knowingly buy a stolen windows key and you just want to score a deal are these cheap keys a good idea really it just comes down to how much risk you're willing to absorb and your own sense of personal ethics buying a key that was originally part of a volume or education package is a violation of Microsoft's license agreement but such a key might work just fine indefinitely Microsoft does in theory anyway revoke keys if they find out that they're being used in an unauthorized manner but enforcement is spotty at best and quite frankly at 1/5 the price even if they did revoke a license you could go buy another one and you'd still be up on the deal now as for the ones that are purchased fraudulently on a stolen card if the victim contacts their credit card company or bank and the purchase gets marked as fraudulent Microsoft could easily find out and mark that key as invalid my understanding is that this doesn't happen very often though so it's more down to the issue of whether you want your money going to credit card thieves or Microsoft you're gonna have to work that one out for yourself now some of these mark places offer buyer protection for additional peace of mind but anecdotal evidence suggests that it might not be completely reliable so if your plan was to grab a cut-rate Windows key and spend the savings on a hyped up game pre-order you may end up disappointed twice speaking of disappointment FreshBooks that's not disappointing it's the super simple to use invoicing tool that actually does a lot more than just help you create and send slick-looking invoices quickly it helps you track your time with their timesheet function manage your expenses and even keep track of who owes you what they've got this really cool feature too that tells you when your clients look at your invoice for the first time so there's no more back and forth oh yeah I didn't pay well I'm sorry I didn't get it yet haha yes you did I have fresh books the mobile app has all the functionality of the desktop version so you can take fresh ebooks with you wherever you go and if you have any questions you can just reach out to their support staff you'll speak to a real human with no phone tree no escalations just answers so visit fresh books comm slash tech wiki and enter tech wiki and the how did you hear about us section when you sign up for your free trial so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos don't forget to subscribe wait No leave a comment if you have a suggestion and also don't forget to subscribe I said it twice it's like a subliminal thing don't forget to subscribe and then I'm like I'm talking about like I don't know like oh look Expo markers don't forget to subscribe see you guys are all subscribed and you don't even know why oops oops