August 25, 2022

Microsoft Office

I just finished reinstalling Windows 10 on this Dell laptop I have. The laptop (purchased at Costco) came with Windows installed, but along with the McAfee antivirus. As most people will tell you, McAfee is far worse than almost any virus and the laptop was all but unusable, especially after the first year when McAfee transforms itself into a form of ransomware.

Now with a clean Windows install (and replacing the hard drive with a SSD), the machine is decent, almost snappy. But my wife says that office is something she needs for it to be truly useful.

I just purchased a product key for Office 2021 Professional Plus, spending all of $19.99 for it.

The story is, these are OEM keys. Somebody buys a bunch of keys (let's say 100), and only uses 76 of them (let's say), so they have 24 left over. Apparently this still gives them a better price of the 76 they actually used, and then they can get some money for the unused 24 by selling those to some reseller. The kindest thing to say about this is that it is a grey area. The keys are legit, but doing this with them violates the terms in which they were originally sold by Microsoft. So, in theory, Microsoft could track the keys down and deactivate them. Apparently this is too much trouble, or at this point is not worth it for them. This is my best understanding of the situation.

I'll also note that the above seller directs you to download the .exe file to install Office from from their website.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org