What causes windows 7 activation requests?
The statement: "You must activate windows within 3 days to continue using all windows features." often pops up in my notifification area on Windows 7.
My windows are legal and I have activated them twice allready. I believe that windows remembers hardware of computer during last activation and shows this warning everytime it detects hardware change.
In my case detected hardware changes are probably caused by running windows from VirtualBox. I have dual boot setup. I can boot to both windows 7 and linux. When I want to use some Windows feature in linux I don't reboot the computer but start my windows 7 from VirtualBox which uses the raw disk insted of virtual one.
I hope that you can tell me which hardware change causes the activation request so i can do something about the popup message.
From MS:
When you make a significant hardware change to your computer, such as upgrading the hard disk and memory at the same time, you might be required to activate Windows again.
Since the VM is a completely different machine than the physical, then when you switch it's a complete hardware change, and Windows want to be reactivated.
More from MS:
Product activation relies on the submission of the Installation ID. The Installation ID is specifically designed to guarantee anonymity and is only used by Microsoft to deter piracy. The Installation ID is comprised of two different pieces of information — the product ID and a hardware hash
...
The hardware hash is an eight byte value that is created by running 10 different pieces of information from the PC's hardware components through a one-way mathematical transformation.
