TL;DR: Anyone have any experience buying and using greymarket Windows 10 enterprise keys?

For reasons I find myself in need of an installation of Windows 10 on a non-test machine for the first time. Although I will not be hosting critically important information on this machine it will never-the-less contain private information I do not wish Microsoft to easily hoover up.

I haven't really ever dealt much in the software licensing side of things, it's not really my department.

Please do not reply if the content of your reply can be summed up as "use linux" as I already do but I have need of Windows 10. Please do not try and lecture me on the benefits of wine and other emulation technologies, I know.

The solution to this would seem to be Window 10 Enterprise Edition. (With this edition you have serious control of updates and telemetry and together with something like W10privacy and I feel it should make me feel secure enough using it (I also use a network firewall/IDS/self-hosted DNS and block ad domains including MS ones but honestly they can spring new ones any time and it's a cat and mouse game and I prefer two methods).)

Yes I can straight up pirate it or use KMS type methods but I'd prefer not to for my own reasons.

My interest is in buying one or more grey market keys from key seller sites. I found one called xkeys which has very reasonable prices, there is also g2a. The question then is, anyone have experience with buying these types of things and uh success or horror stories?

And more importantly I'm not sure I understand the licensing rules for the Enterprise perpetual license Do I just need to buy a license for this enterprise edition or do I also need a license for Windows 10 pro for example to upgrade it to the Enterprise license with one of these keys?

If you have experience with KMS methods you can also offer input but I really am looking towards the grey-market keys idea.

Thanks.

    • darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      But you are saying you have to upgrade from another version of Windows 10 with existing activated license? I would be doing a clean install without any keys for existing Windows 10 licenses of any kind. If it is required then I would also have to purchase a windows 10 professional key. Not a major deal it seems but alright.

      Thanks for the advice and the optional method. And that script appears to say it uses KMS methods. I just don't want the hassle of MS introducing an update that causes me trouble with activation or for that matter to have to re-activate frequently. But it's much appreciated just the same.