Windows 10: Windows decided to revoke my activation key

I have purchased a windows 10 professional OEM key off of Kingwin in January 2020 and used it with no issue until today. I turn on my computer only to find the dreaded "Activate windows" watermark on my screen. going into the activation settings, it tells me that I don't have a valid key and if I think I do, to troubleshoot. So I did that, no help at all. No one answers and the bot is driving me in circles, I can't even put in my phone number for them to call me as apparently my country doesn't exist.

Not sure whats caused this, could be a virus did a quick scan with norton that turned up clean, and currently doing a deep scan but that'll take weeks to finish or it could be a registry issue that I don't know how to fix Software protection is stopped and I can't start it again or a mix of both.

All in all I'm rather annoyed by this issue and I don't want to buy windows again.

:)

 

How to revoke GTA IV key

It's a very long key on the booklet, so you are saying thats the issue?

 

How to revoke GTA IV key

The retail verison of GTA 4 that you passed on to your nephew contains a cd key... Does it look like this:

• Grand Theft Auto IV CD Keys in this format: 1ABCD-D3FGH-45I67 (not actual key)

If not and the key looks different, it can't be activated on Steam. That may be why he's having difficulty. Taken from here

 

How to revoke GTA IV key

A while ago I installed GTA IV from dvd, it did not had steam yet.
I bought a samsung 840 evo ssd and was using rapid mode which messed up my windows installation and had to do a factory reset since windows would not load anymore.

After that all was fine without using rapid mode and never had a problem again.
Then I started using steam, I did not know you could activate any game on steam if you had a key so I bought GTA IV on steam back then. Now I gave the GTA IV DVD to my nephew but now he can't activate the game on steam.

The problem is, with my previous messed up windows I was ofcourse unable to revoke the GTA IV key.

Is there anything I can do?

Thanks!