Windows 10: Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Skip Ahead Build 16362 for PC

Why?

Although some of my Hyper-V virtual machines are activated, I also have several which are not activated, oldest of them at the moment from beginning of this year. I use these not activated virtual machines for various test purposes as well as for instance to get Insider build upgrades to make an ISO for different editions and language versions of Windows 10 as told in this tutorial: Use Hyper-V virtual machine to get Windows 10 Insider ISO Windows 10 Virtualization Tutorials

Whenever I need to / want to, I can just reinstall the specific edition and language version for that VM and start from scratch.

If you decide to get a VM activated, then it is important to remember that same rules about digital license apply than applies to physical machines. This means that you should thereafter never delete the virtual machine; you can clean install on that same VM as often as you want to and get Windows automatically activated with digital license based on that virtual machine's unique hardware ID. If you then create a new VM, it's again a new machine with unique ID requiring another license.

You can even delete the VM's virtual hard disk, create a new VHD and clean install on it in case you want to switch to a different size disk or simply want to start from scratch, or add additional virtual hard disks and install the same edition on a dual boot scenario. As hard disk information is not included in Windows 10 Hardware ID 3 which is used for digital license validation, the edition of Windows 10 which has digital license for that virtual machine will always be automatically activated, be it single or multiboot scenario.

In case you need to clean install on host, you just need to remember to export your virtual machines first to an external storage, then after host clean install is done, import them back.

The above about activating a virtual machine applies of course not only to Hyper-V but to all virtualization platforms like VMware, VirtualBox, Parallels and so on.

To get digital licensing working, Microsoft has been forced to change their earlier "license is valid for one installation on one PC" policy, although this is still not changed in official EULA. A Windows 10 PC does no longer accept multiple product keys for the same edition, if your original W10 is digitally licensed and you install a second copy of the same edition for dual boot using another product key, the key will also be changed for the first instance. Only one product key and digital license for a specific edition will be accepted.

A single digital license covers every instance of same edition on same machine. As soon as your PC has a digital license for a specific edition you can install the same edition in a multiboot scenario as many times as you want to. If you want 10 copies of Windows 10 PRO running side by side on one PC setting each of them up with different settings and software for whatever purpose, they all will be digitally licensed based on that machines hardware ID. For instance, I have a second copy of W10 PRO installed on dual boot on this laptop, with minimal start-up items, services and software to leave as much resources as possible to resource intensive video editing and encoding. In doing this I can save a considerable amount of time (and nerves!) when working with videos.

Notice that validity of a digital license has nothing to do with a Microsoft account. A digital license although it can be assigned to a Microsoft account is not tied to that account nor based on it. Assigning a digital license to a Microsoft account is mostly only for license transfer and activation troubleshooting purposes, but even computers with no Microsoft accounts will be digitally licensed. A Microsoft account just adds an additional security layer for the license in case something happens or the license needs to be transferred to another PC:

On a multiboot system with several instances of same edition of W10, each of these can be set up with different Microsoft, local, Azure AD or domain account. However, if one of additional instances on your multiboot system will be set up with a Microsoft account, the digital license of that PC will be transferred to new Microsoft account and removed from the list of devices on the previous Microsoft account. Therefore, when using the same Microsoft account for each install, if the computer name is different for each Windows setup on your multiboot system, this might theoretically cause account verification and activation issues which is why I recommend changing the computer name at boot for each additional instance when installing, using the original computer name (name of first activated instance) for each additional install. See this post for changing PC name while installing before setting up the initial user: Tips and tricks - You saw it first on TenForums! Solved - Windows 10 Forums

 

This Build is unstable in numerous areas.

 

Thank you for the detailed explanation, appreciated.
You have convinced me that it is worthwhile keeping the VM with a copy of the current Skip-ahead preview, even though it is not activated.

 

I just found out what hamburger does to my Start menu:

 

One of the benefits in using a VM to get Insider builds is that you do not have to have your main host OS opted in to be able to use Insider builds on it, or even if you opt in, you can set the main OS on host to Slow Ring.

Use a VM to get build upgrades, make an ISO and upgrade host with it when you are ready. No "forced" upgrades on host.

 

Yeah, pretty useless, don't you think?

I liked the older style better:

 

It must be a bug, it should still look same.

 

Up all night and now this build is behaving. Still "feels" unstable. and twitchy. Given the current Canary compiled Thus viz.
10.0.16366.1000 (rs_prerelease.170914-1557)
Om figuring 16357 compiled Friday for us Skippers. It will be interesting to see how we will merge with the rs3 folkds (of which I am on a VM in Linux). Hope everybody had a nice weekend. I stayed up all night with this current build but it is behaving much better - so far.

 

Got the new Nvidia driver a few minutes ago.

Edge still freezes now and then upon first use a while into it, but upon closing out and reopening it seems fine. *Confused

No other issues besides my keyboard starting up my tower in both partition OSs. Checked the BIOS and all I could think of. Found nothing online. Plain weird. For now I'm unplugging it when retiring for the night.

 

Only minor consideration for Users on Slow Ring is that in last few weeks before an RTM release, even Slow Ring can get updated quite often. Always a good plan to make image backups before and after upgrading.

 

Attention CCleaner users:

Tweet



— Twitter API (@user) date[/quote]

 

This problem pops up in new builds now and than and it's in this one too. CD/DVD drive just stops reading CD/DVD disks. Drive works perfectly, tried it in W7 on same machine, reads even from a Linux in VM and as live. Usual fix of deleting driver and let it rebuild driver doesn't work either.
Device manager, can't populate, shows 0 Bytes.
Disk management reports no media.