Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

Re:Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 wi... by andix on Saturday January 03, 2026 @04:53PM (#46482042)

I don't think regular Windows 11 is that useful in those cases. You probably either want an intranet connected Windows client, that gets activated and updated via a local server. Probably also a LTSC release, that doesn't get feature updates all the time.

Or a Windows 11 IoT image, that only enables some specific features, and is stripped down for a specific purpose.

For individual use I guess the solution is to set it up once with internet connectivity and air gap afterwards.

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Re:Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 wi... by leptons on Saturday January 03, 2026 @05:09PM (#46482221)

>For individual use I guess the solution is to set it up once with internet connectivity and air gap afterwards.

That's simply not good enough for some purposes. Once a computer is connected to the internet, at all for any amount of time, the system could be considered to be less secure.

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Re:Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 wi... by andix on Saturday January 03, 2026 @05:20PM (#46482316)

Sure, but why do you need to use Windows for such a specific setup?

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Re:Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 wi... by leptons on Saturday January 03, 2026 @11:30PM (#46484928)

Because someone somewhere wrote some software that only runs on Windows. That isn't the important detail here.

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