i dont understand… perhaps because i have no idea how Microsoft’s key is used?
I never needed to know about keys … there was some ‘code’ on the distribution dvd for win7… has that evolved into a firmware key?
Where is this firmware that stores the key? Is it in hardware or in the OS?
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100%. 
I claim both nerd and geek as my own. I forget back in the last century nerd was often an insult.
One of my friend’s kids hit me with you were born in the 1900s you wouldn’t understand a few weeks back. He got me good that little turd. 
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Welcome to our site and thanks for your contribution
One of the 2 sure things in life taxes and death, and even the you continue to pay taxes.
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Hey I resemble that remark! Anyway - I’m old enough to consider “nerd” an insult - and I certainly wasn’t a nerd in high school, I was a budding juvenile delinquent, and cops brought me home to my exasperated parents on a number of occasions… But I’m proud of being a bit of a geek… Actually - there’s one nerdship I acknowledge I’m one - a “paleonerd” I just love palaeontology, and ancient life - not necessarily dinosaurs, my preference is permian and early triassic synapsids (we’re synapsid!) like the goronopsids (first sabre tooths) and dimetrodon…
Love some Scandinavian doom metal, like Slomosa from Norway, and Candlesmass from Sweden (catching them play my town in October - can’t wait!), but also I “sorta” know the guys from Swedish black metal band Watain - and partied with them when they toured Perth in 2015, along with some of the guys from Behemoth (but not Nergal though)… The only Finnish metal band I can name off the top of my head is Opeth - and they’re so huge they’re almost mainstream, and I’m not really into their oeuvre anyway…
Oh - nearly forgot Meshugga - but haven’t listened to them for a few years… Oh and “Shape of Despair” who are actually FINNISH! And they’re kinda doomy and deathy or black doom?
I have trouble telling between some sub-genres of metal - I have a kwi mate who’s a diehard metalhead and he’s always chewing me out for calling some band “doom metal” when they’re “sludge metal”…
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Do you include humans in that? Is archeology nerdy enough? I prefer more recent history, especially medieval period.
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Thanks, Howard. Since Win11 was installed on my micro Optiplex, your trick works. Will I ever want to put Win11 back on this machine? Not bloody likely.
Paleontology/Archeology is all fascinating. New discoveries keep pushing the entry of humans into the Americas to more than 20K years ago–the ‘Kelp Highway’ was open when the Bering Sea landbridge was still impassible.
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I do find ancient history fascinating too… But I prefer kinda pre-christian history and find it more interesting… Having said that - I love Barbara Tuchmann’s “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century” (about the constant wars between England and France, the Bubonic plague, and the two popes - it’s non-fiction) - she’s my favourite “popular history” author / essayist…
And also paleo-anthropolgy. Like anything to do with australopithecines, and homo erectus, habilis, naledi, ergaster and homo sapiens neanderthalensis - and I’m hoping they’ll find more denisovan remains, so far all we’ve got is bits of finger bones I think.
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I went to Mungo Lake , years ago during my time in the outback. It is today devastatingly dry, flat country, part of the Darling flood plain , I think.
It must have been more friendly 40000 years ago when inhabited.
Yes , i know your preference. I actually like medieval philosophy and theology and the way it shaped medieval society.
There is this fascinating book by Chesterton
It is about the culture and philosophy of the ancient world and how christianity changed it.
You might appreciate the first half of that book.
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You should listen to symphonic metal band from Finland Dan Nightwish they are very good and gothic 69 eyes are also good and sonata arctica and Stratovarius.
Opeth is Swedish and formed in Stockholm.
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The key in the registry editor is set when one activates Windows but it is not the key that one has bought when installing W11!! This one is just a placebo encrypted key that Windows has assigned, the real key is stored into your MS account!! The workaround is to use Magical Jellybean Keyfinder, or some other app to find the real key!! OEM keys are treated differently!!
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I think it’s from Sweden. We have big names like Children of Bodom, Amorphis. Then we have Omnium Catherum, Shape of Despair, Shade Empire, Ghost Brigade. Then if you want to try some who use Finnish, Stam1na and Mokoma!
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A waste of time for me is Distro hopping. It seems a lot of people like jumping from one Linux to the next. And it was almost like gee, if you didn’t Distro hop there was something wrong with you.
Of course, you can not discover how other Linux look like unless you try them out. But in the end, all of them do the same thing. Runs your PC.
But yes, I done some hopping, but I have always come back to Mint. Right now I am installing Zorin to have a new look at it.
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Yes, but there are some people who think the linux design is too monocultural … they want to see different approaches to running a computer , so they go looking, but dont really find it within Linux.
They probably end up becoming developers, and because of the scale of the thing, they tend to get into minimalist OS’s
Or maybe they become Gentoo or LFS users , because that lets them at least have some say in design.
And a few start yet another linux distro.
We need these explorers, but it is not for everyone.
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Agree totally within that statement, I would add trying to find command line options when in the gui environment to do something there is an icon for.
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By using Gnome Boxes (or any other virtual machine), I can distro-hop without messing up my machine. More than a few distros require changes to a disk or a partition that can interfere with my setup, so I refrain from installing something just to look at it. Another way is to use Ventoy or Etcher or dd to put a bootable iso on a usb stick for demo purposes.
Of course, any distro that doesn’t want to play as a live distro or in a virtual machine goes right on my s**t list.
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My reply would be to use
Totally risk free for testing. But are you really testing with this or just looking at different screen layouts
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Same here… I don’t generally distro hop a lot… When I want to try another distro - I fire up a VM with virt-manager and kvm/qemu… and I never dual or multi boot…
I have a few years ago… Maybe 5 years ago?
4 years ago I settled on Pop!_OS 22.04 on my desktop and Thinkpad - but it started getting a bit “long in the tooth” so I switched to Ubuntu 24.04 (on both) about 12 months ago now…
5 years I tried a bunch of different distros - including Garuda, Manjaro, Fedora… Went back to Ubuntu world…
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That is debatable. Sometimes a commsnd needs to be started in a particular environment that the gui does not provide,
eg ) Using R. … you always start R in the directory where its saved workspace is located. There can be seversl R instances running at once… each in its own directory … so they do not clash, No icon can do that. Most of the hopeless gui attempts to provide an R icon do not even ask you where the work directory is …they just start it in the home directory. They are useless.
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In general I agree, but
There are sometimes reasons to test a distro with a hard install. One case I had recently (with antiX) was when I wanted to build a distribution .iso. I suspected that a VM install might make a deficient .iso, so I played it safe and used a hard install.
Another case is if you want to check its graphics drivers … I only discovered NetBSD would not drive my graphics when I did a hard install.
Yes that site is OK, but there are limitations to what one can test … eg graphics compatalility.
I dont think we should argue away the enjoyment people get from testing various distros. It is a fun adventure thing, and it does build confidence and help to educate users.
It would be a dull world if we all stood still.
Explore BSD … a totally new adventure awaits.
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I agree with you here Neville
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