Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 10525 Insider

badrobot said:

Wait, when you say activated, does it show "Activated" and at the same time showing the January 2016 expiration date below it?

It doesn't have an expiration date; just that it's activated.

And no, it's not the RTM I upgraded to from Windows 8.1. :) That one has all my programs still installed.; one of these days, I'm gonna do a clean install, but not yet.

Each new build had an expiry date, this one is even longer than before, new ones are expected of course with new expiry date. And so ad nauseam (i hope)

Wynona said:

How does Microsoft know if it's been activated if I have formatted the hard drive?

Never mind . . . dummy moment; of course, Microsoft knows everything about my computers now. I'm not really sure I'm liking this!

And I don't have any other computers to check this out on without dragging one out of the cobwebs at the back of the closet. :)

After you do the free upgrade, and Windows 10 activates. A hardware ID is stored on the Microsoft activation server for that PC. Then when you do a clean install latter on, it looks for that hardware ID. If it finds it, your activated, if it doesn't, your not activated. That's how their doing it now. Looks like that's carried over to the Insider preview program. Clean installs of the Insider preview now follow the same rules as installing the Consumer version.

If your running 10240, and opt in to receive insider previews, you'll get the watermark etc once you upgrade to 10525. Opt back out, roll back, no watermark and no expiry date.

gdscrtr said:

mine says it expires 7/15/2016

Yes, yours is from "winver" and mine was from "Update & Security" in Settings. :) I get the same results you do when running winver.

Thanks for the lessons, guys! Although I wasn't having trouble with anything, hopefully what we've discussed here will help those who are having problems.

wase
Go to these settings your looking at the wrong ones.
Settings / update and security/ windows update/ advanced options at the bottom of the page then fastring