How to know if activation is NOT an insider build?

Charlie said:

I have a rtm and a new insider build both are activated. One say expire date other has no expire date. Run winver to get.

I installed 10120 in a new Hyper-V VM yesterday, activated it with the generic key and upgraded it to 10240. It showed fully activated (with no expiry) in slmgr /dlv, slmgr/xpr and winver.

I then linked it to my MS account and upgraded to 10525 through windows update and it now has an expiry date of 7/16/2016. Almost the same as you - could be timezone as mine expires at 01:59am. Seems 10525 has an expiry (and a watermark) whereas 10240 doesn't.

Presumably the machine (virtual in my case) is still registered on MS servers (as it was activated before).

Hopefully there will be another build before next July anyway

halasz said:

I installed 10120 in a new Hyper-V VM yesterday, activated it with the generic key and upgraded it to 10240. It showed fully activated (with no expiry) in slmgr /dlv, slmgr/xpr and winver.

I then linked it to my MS account and upgraded to 10525 through windows update and it now has an expiry date of 7/16/2016. Almost the same as you - could be timezone as mine expires at 01:59am. Seems 10525 has an expiry (and a watermark) whereas 10240 doesn't.

Presumably the machine (virtual in my case) is still registered on MS servers (as it was activated before).

Hopefully there will be another build before next July anyway

Gabe has said repeatedly in his tweets that future insider builds would expire. So, that is what you have discovered. And, since it is a future build, not the RTM build, it is basically unrelated to my situation.

Mark Phelps said:

Gabe has said repeatedly in his tweets that future insider builds would expire. So, that is what you have discovered. And, since it is a future build, not the RTM build, it is basically unrelated to my situation.

The reply was for @Charlie really. If your winver looks like his for 10240 then you are permanently activated.

The point being is that if you do rejoin the insider program (I know you said you'd had enough) then your fully activated RTM will change to an insider build with an expiry date. In that case you may have to re-install if you want to go back to the outsider path.

I think the main source of confusion about this "permanent activation" is that earlier versions of the Insider builds used a generic key and got activated. Then, the RTM came out and not only did the expiration date vanish, but the watermark disappeared from the desktop and the two "slmgr" commands then both came back with results clearly indicating that the PCs were permanently activated.

In the meantime, Gabe came out with another Tweet that said "future builds" would expire, and as can now be seen from the 10525 build, that is indeed the case.

What remains to be seen, and might actually be happening now, is what happens to all the older RTM builds that showed as permanently activated but were NOT actually upgrades from Win7/8/8.1. My guess is that MS will be pushing out an update that "deactivates" all these "non-update" installs.