I bought a used laptop on eBay about 7-8 months ago with Office 2010 preinstalled, and approximately 6 months after I bought it I began getting the Office Activation Wizard, giving me warning that I had only a few days to activate the product. I ignored this and now the wizard gives me the message in this thread’s title.
Thing is that other than a red bar on top of my Office applications saying “[Application] (product activation failed)”, everything seems to be functioning normally. I can make all sorts of changes, save things, print them etc.
So the question is whether there are any practical ramifications that I’m unaware of? Are there some more obscure functions that I might one day want to use? Or will functionality degrade at some point in the future.
[I’ve emailed the seller with no response, and I spoke to eBay who said they can’t do anything so long after the sale, beyond trying to contact the seller too.]
I have applications I used sparingly for years, Microsoft Authentication killed em all off when I rebuilt another system with another copied drive.
None of them will work without it. You cant build a new comp without new drivers downloaded and be connected authenticated…even if it was all done years ago with the applications.
To answer your third paragraph, I think it’s just nagware basically. I haven’t noticed any problems when I’ve used a computer like that. E.g. Excel Addons install and run fine. This is for 2010, and may not apply to other versions.
