It's effectively emulating a Windows Update client to retrieve all the update bits. Then there's some hoop jumps to bake an ISO.

It's also important to point out Insider builds are free for use, with some restrictions, providing a cheap alternative. [1]

[1] https://insider.windows.com/en-us/program-agreement/

Are there any reasons to register windows 10, besides being able to change your desktop background? AFAIK the "this copy of windows is not genuine" message is benign.

It allows access to certain features. I believe Hyper-V and a few others are locked behind a license door.

It is benign but a bit annoying because it overlays all windows.

You can just use a "rogue" KMS server to activate Windows with no risks for you. For example, as an admin: slmgr /skms kms.digiboy.ir

I believe Win10 license price scales roughly with processor power, so it might be fine.

Also, screen size. Since ~2014 Microsoft has stated that Windows 10 is free to OEMs selling devices intended for screens smaller than 9 inches.

Which gets to the complicated part of the question in that this is the licensing for OEMs. Running Windows 10 on an RPi as a "consumer" that isn't an OEM (and isn't building/reselling devices) is an interesting question.

Though as a consumer, Windows 10 is also weirdly "shareware" these days in that it's not entirely that mean in what features it disables (versus say XP almost not working at all) when not activated and will happily explain in the Microsoft Store how much it costs to activate and let you buy it there. (Example: https://www.windowscentral.com/you-do-not-need-activate-wind...)

licenses are about 5$ on ebay

Those aren’t legitimate. Please don’t suggest that here

AFAIK the resale of software regardless of EULA restrictions has been declared legal in some European countries. They're not necessarily legit in the US, but we're not everywhere.

Also even in the US, if you're a home user there's no real concern. I wouldn't run a business on resold keys but I'd certainly use them for home if I needed one.

That' not true. Reselling volume licenses is perfectly legal in the EU.

are you the seller or how do you know? (serious question)

uupdump.ml is another site that does the same thing.

> Wouldn't the license cost more than the hardware?

That's an odd argument. Software has to cost less than the hardware that runs it? When you can get computers for $35 or less, that doesn't leave much of a margin.

The user ought to be interested in a term Microsoft has loved in the past. Total cost of ownership. If a user is looking at paying $35 for hardware + $119 for software and doesn't have a desire to pay for real support, as opposed to the imaginary support you get as an oem pc buyer, and we aren't interested in calculating the cost of power and net connectivity etc then the TCO is $154.

For $154 you can get a lot more computer with linux. The implication is that for cheap hardware only very cheap software is competitive because people willing to pay that much money would be better spending it on a better computer.

The unit cost of duplicating software is so close to zero that it might as well be zero and people are willing to give away great software so selling it becomes a challenge.

>For $154 you can get a lot more computer with linux.

Although I totally agree with you for that price you can get also get far more computer with Windows! Refurbished Intel machines with a windows 10 home license can be had all day long for $89+.

> Refurbished Intel machines with a windows 10 home license can be had all day long for $89+.

From where? Honestly curious. (I don't need state-of-the-art, and I'm a cheapskate, so...)

Microcenter! This link should work, but if not: microcenter.com -> products -> refurbished deals -> desktops. Select "sort by price, lowest first" and click search.

https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?N=429...

Check your local pawnshop.

I bought a C2 Duo laptop in 2015 for $AU50 with a 3 month warranty and did the Windows 7 -> 10 upgrade. Earmuffs if you can't stand the fan noise. :)

If you want a relatively expensive to run space heater slower than the rasberry pi with a 6 year old hard drive which will eat all data not backed up within 1 year. Also note that some of what you backed up will probably be silently corrupted.

My experience with SD cards suggests the raspberry pi is just as likely to eat your data as an old harddisk

You missed the opportunity to spell Microsoft with a "$". Seriously, you are quoting 90's tribal chants.

I'm sitting in front of an 8 year old PC with a quad core, 2.4GHz intel cpu with 8GHz of RAM. It will run rings around any raspberry pi. I use linux machines for work all day long and my home pc for all my personal use. I had one hard drive die a couple years back, but that has nothing to do with the OS. That is all the data loss I've had in 25 years of using PCs. No viruses, and BSOD's are a distant memory (BTW, the linux machines at work crash sometimes too).

Although to say that I'm not a fan of Microsoft would be an understatement I'm not telling you that its impossible to find an acceptable windows environment or impossible to prefer your windows environment. I am making a handful of much easier claims.

- Objectively if you you $150 to spend then spending $112 on the OS leaves you so objectively worse off than spending $0 that its hard to justify the retail cost of a windows license even if you prefer the windows environment. In essence the claim is that windows isn't so much better than pi + windows is better than 5x the computer + linux. Microsoft agrees which is why device makers for cheap devices have historically been able to get a lower per unit than for more fully loaded devices even if the windows sku they shipped with was a less featureful version.

You can't get an acceptable desktop machine for $89 to compare to your $35 rasberry pi. Such a machine will likely be underpowered, it will use 30x as much power, and it will be more likely to die relatively quickly.

Average hard drive lifespan is 3-5 years of use if I recall correctly. Many drives especially if used relatively less may in fact last longer but the average user is less likely to experience hard drive failure insofar as they trash the entire computer before it fails or in fact HAVE experienced it but in fact experience it as "my computer doesn't work anymore" rather than specifically understanding which component failed. Especially if by the time it fails a new machine is objectively desirable.

If you buy an 8 year old machine it would be remarkable if it lasted more than 2 years more during which it would have been liable to use $80 more electricity based on 20 hours of weekly usage.

In brief if you spend $170 and find some dude on craigslist with a particularly good deal you might be able to have a slightly worse or slightly better experience than someone with $35 in their pocket can have any day of the week and twice on sunday.

In short people buying small cheap computers like the pi aren't just too stupid to use craigslist they are making an objective choice with reasonable tradeoffs.

And you're willing to sell that computer for 89-154 USD?

Maybe tasty_freeze isn't. (Maybe technofiend isn't, either.) But if technofiend is right, then somebody is. That somebody doesn't need to be tasty_freeze.

And tasty_freeze isn't the one who made the $89-154 claim. tasty_freeze's claim is that 8-year-old machines work fine, and don't lose data (much).

This is what I find on craigslist for $80

System: Window 10 Pro Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G840 @ 2.80 GHz Memory: 4GB Storage: 250GB

It's 6 years old dual core slow hard drive and runs like a dog. You could use the extra money to buy a small ssd instad...

There are (heavily used) PCs with those specs in that price range on eBay, but they'd be pretty hard to mount on a quadcopter or whatever.

> 8GHz of RAM

I assume you mean GB, right?

SQL Server Enterprise costs about $7000 per core, and Adobe Creative Suite (pre-subscription model) was $2600, both oft run on computers that cost less. And those aren't even that expensive overall.