This water mark keeps appearing on my screen randomly had the computer for around 3-4 years now. I had windows 10 and all that but now when I try to activate it runs into a error 0x80070002. On the Product key area only shows last 5 letters/digits. I've done all the tricks Ive seen to get rid of the water mark but it comes back after a hour or if I launch a game. One moment I have windows 10 and next moment I don't and the product key is blank.
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Microsoft no longer stores entire MS product keys on the computer.
Did that Win 10 come with a new computer, e.g., Dell or HP, or did you buy a Win 10 product key "off the Web at a great price" and install it?
We've all seen companies saying they are an Authorized Microsoft Reseller and they sell product keys for Windows and MS Office at great prices. You receive the key and it does work.
What they do is this:
If Microsoft sold Office Professional Plus, etc., to large corporations for the retail price of around $450 per seat, those companies would all say, "Are you
kidding, Microsoft?? Buy 25,000 copies at $450 each?? Over 11
million dollars?? It will be cheaper for us to
write and install our own software!" (Or nowadays to use something like LibreOffice.)
Microsoft issues
Enterprise licenses that sell for as low as
twenty-six dollars per seat!
That is how MS maintains its monopoly on office software.
Those Authorized Resellers with great prices? What they do is sell
the same key to an
Enterprise license to
different customers.
Several years ago at a company I worked for we bought 2 licenses to Office 2016. The seller sent us
one product key for "two installations", and it worked.
Months later we needed another seat, so we bought a third license. We didn't say anything about "previous order", etc. The seller sent us the SAME product key. And it worked again.
What
eventually happens is that MS realizes a specific Enterprise key has been "compromised" and deauthorizes it.
As long as a user doesn't do major changes that installation
usually will
continue to work, without any kind of warning or message that the product key is invalid.
(Another time, from the same company, we received a key and it didn't work. When we contacted them by email, without detail they just sent us a different key that did work.)
