Do I Have To License Windows?

A growing number of people have now heard the claim that Windows 10 and 7 both work just fine without licensing the OS. We've put both claims to the test for a few months and have not seen a single compatibility issue, beyond the fact that it prevents accessing themes. In checking around with other experts, it turns out that Windows 10 has been used in its unlicensed state by some people for years without a single drawback other than the disabling of a few personalization features, and the absense of Microsoft technical support. Others, claim that one detail or another in some program didn't work. We have seen warnings of this, but we haven't discovered any such problems ourselves. So far everything beyond personalization features seem to work just fine.

With Windows 7 you'll get a nag screen each time you boot. Clicking the x gets rid of it. Then to set the wallpaper you can right-click an image and select "set as desktop background".

Windows 10 works the same way, except without a nag screen - yes, even easier.

Of course there's no guarrantee that this won't change. But so far there appears to be no practical consequence to indefinitely holding off on licensing either Windows 7 or 10.

You'll see this sentence in the lower right corner of the desktop: "This copy of windows is not genuine." It doesn't seem to cause any problems, and disappears once you have input the license key.

We did discover what looked like a major Microsoft warning when running Virtual PC. It stated that some features will remain disabled until Windows has been licensed. However, we couldn't find any disabled features. It worked just fine.