Windows Genuine: A Quick Look at Activation and MSE

Today I woke up and turned on my computer to find that my 30-day grace period expired (I often forget to activate Windows within the 30-day grace period and don’t opt for auto-activation when installing Windows onto a PC, so this happens to me quite often). OK, I thought, I’ll put in my product key and away I go. I grabbed one of my many Windows 7 keys, put it in and activated Windows 7. Everything seemed OK, until I checked Microsoft Security Essentials. The little bugger still needed me to validate Windows 7. I had always thought that MSE would automatically perform this crucial step after activating Windows, apparently not. I believe the key reason for it going into this mode is because I waited so long to actually activate Windows 7 and wound up past the 30 day grace period. So, I thought that I would make a post regarding this specific issue (though, this isn’t a bug in any way, it still can be a nuisance). So, if you have recently gone past the 30-day grace period for Windows 7 and have recently activated it, you may need to re-validate MSE as well. Here’s how.

 

 

If you see this screen, and you actually have a legal copy of Windows 7 with a legal product key, then you probably forgot to activate it and you must re-validate MSE after activation. To do so, simply click on “Run a validation check.”

 

 

MSE will connect to one of Microsoft’s servers to verify your activation and product key. This should really take no longer than 10 seconds.

 

 

If all goes well, Microsoft will verify your Windows activation and you can go back to using MSE as your favorite anti-virus product. By the way, I highly recommend MSE as a personal anti-virus program. For the most part, it keeps out of your way and gets the job done without too much fuss. In rare circumstances, such as this one, user interaction may be needed. However, this is probably the first time that I’ve touched MSE since I installed it, about 30 days ago. Hopefully this helps anyone with MSE validation issues and why they may be having them. To learn more about why having Windows Genuine is a good thing you can read more at Microsoft. I hope to write an article/post sometime in the future about Windows Genuine Technologies and why Microsoft uses them.

 

As always, you can contact me via Twitter (@jctierney) or leave a comment below. I’ve also started a new e-mail address for this site, tinkeringwithwindows @ live dot com. Feel free to drop me a line every now and then. I welcome anyone who has a question, comment, suggestion, etc. to feel free to e-mail me at that address.

 

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