# wingaming: windows can be used without license for some tasks just fine

a while ago i bought borderlands 3 + dlcs very cheaply in a steam sale. it's a nice game. this winter i had some free time to play it. but in order to get the max framerate out of it, i decided i'll use windows rather than running it in linux with steam's proton.

so i downloaded the official windows installer and installed windows 10 on my 10 year old gaming machine. it was hibernating in the basement for the past 5 or so years. i tried windows 11 too but that didn't work because my machine didn't have tpm chip for secureboot or something. i think. the installer just said "your machine does not meet system requirements". (i don't get why developers cannot make the error messages more useful. include the requirement not met, sigh.)

anyway, windows 10 worked fine but until you activate it, you see a "activate windows" watermark in the bottom right corner. and you cannot customize the desktop such as changing the wallpaper either. but otherwise it's a completely functional windows that you can use freely!

i had a valid windows license at some point but i lost the details and i'm pretty sure i wouldn't be able to use on newer windows anyway. anyway, it makes no sense for me to pay the full license fee just to use the system for a week and then never again. i wouldn't want to use windows as day-to-day operating system anyway. windows is goddamn slow compared to an equivalent linux. i had to wait seconds for the menu to appear when i right click on the desktop. (i installed it on a spinning disk, not ssd but that shouldn't make such a simple operation this slow.)

but anyway, the "activate windows" watermark is annoying because it appears even when you run games full screen. if you can live with it then that's it, game away. but for my own future reference let me document how to get rid of it:

• start your game as usual.
• press ctrl-shift-escape to run the task manager.
• kill the "Windows Explorer" process. it's somewhere near the end of the task list.
• the watermark should disappear now (along with other stuff such as the desktop wallpaper or the start menu but whatever, good riddance).
• go back to the game via alt-tab and enjoy.
• once finished, run "explorer.exe". the task manager has a menu item for starting new processes.
• then shut down the system to end the suffering that is windows.

that's it. i've looked other ways to get rid of the watermark such as regedit hacks but they didn't work. then my vacation time ran out, the machine went back to the basement. it would have made no sense to buy a license just for a few days. and if i would have needed one then i would have just accepted the small framerate loss and played it in linux. so this wasn't a lost sale anyway.

(also what's up with operating systems blasting ads into your face right after installing it? i mean they appear in the start menu, in the default browser's starting page, the default search engine's page, ads ads ads everywhere. and people pay for this? i'm very sad about the state of affairs of computers.)

published on 2024-01-20

to the frontpage