Windows 8 has hit the RTM (Released To Manufacturing) stage so those people with Software Assurance, MSDN etc are able to install the final copy of Microsoft’s latest OS. However it’s not all plain sailing.
It seems sometimes, with the Enterprise version, it refused to activate. You get the screen overlay in the right hand corner telling you to activate but when you go to settings to do so, it fails. The ones I’ve seen fail with a “DNS name does not exist” and shows that it has a license key already, that ends “CWCK7” despite you not having entered one. There no longer appears to be a way of manually typing the key into the Windows Activation section…so what to do?
I came across an article at here that told me what to do, which is actually quite simple:
slmgr -ipk “valid license key”
That 2nd character is a lower case “L” by the way!
Couple of things I thought I’d mention to make things a bit easier:
First of all – you must run command prompt as an admin.
I must admit I struggled for a while to work out how to run CMD as an admin on my Windows 8 tablet. How do you right click without a mouse?
Simple (once you know/remember how) – swipe up on the app icon and it brings up the app commands at the bottom of the screen. Hit “Run as Admin” and you’re away!
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 