How much does it cost to get a genuine version anyway? I don't actually know.
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Depends how. If an upgrade from a previous version of Windows thrn you can sometimes get it free or a little a £15 for an OEM copy.

I've been tricking M$ out of free copies from years. Since Win7 and all my "free" copies it allowed a free upgrade to Win8 which I grabbed but never installed. But when Win10, if you had a copy of 8 you could upgrade for free. So got 10 free. Then with 11, if a member of the free windows insider group you gain access to beta and test builds of new versions, and they offered free upgrades to 11. So not had to pay for years!

Retain copy of 11 Pro is only £45 for anyone without an existing copy through, so not a huge amount. I remember paying £165 many years ago for a retail copy of Vista ultimate edition.
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And me H.....

Win XP Pro cost me a couple of hefty Licence fees & then....

I got Windows 8 Pro free from a hooky version of 7 Ultimate.

Since then Win 8.1 Pro, Win10 Pro & Win11 Pro have all been free.
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45 quid isn't too bad actually, I was expecting a lot more than that. Funny how many things have gone up up up in price but OSses have come down it seems.
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True.. except remember when Windows 10 was released M$ stated it was the last ever version of Windows? And that it would just be continuously upgraded and updated over time into the future. Yet then Windows 11 appeared. Funny that.
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Bill had been Fu*king folk for too many years. Proper Monopoly.

I understood one of the reasons was for added Security via the new Trusted Platform (Total Poo)

Intel ARM CPU's also benefit. The per Core Overclocking is awesome on these Socket1700 CPU's & Win 11 allows you to specify certain CPU functions to particular CPU Cores. Obviously, you'll want to direct the calculations to the better/faster Cores.
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I kinda remember it, vaguely, but I'm not so into tech news like I used to be. A bold statement like that seems (in the cold light of hindsight) to have been just marketing nonsense.
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At least they aren't doing the 'rapid release' thing otherwise we'd be probably up to Windows 98 and beyond by now .

When you consider how stable Windows XP became after SP3 and how many people continued to use it for so long, you could argue that the price of the license was worth it. I of course just stuck with a totally legitimate version which Harrison sent me years ago .
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Stable version of XP? You must have been living in a parallel universe. I never thought it was that stable, even with SP3, compared to Win2000 Pro. As soon as Vista came out I moved on.
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Vista!?

It was the most useless version of windows ever after ME.

If you moved on, was it to the Mackintosh Platform?
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