So The Day Job has required that I upgrade to Windows 11 in order to RDP because Windows 10 isn't secure. I purchased an upgrade license from my installed Windows 10, secure in the belief that one of the strategies in this Tom's Hardware article would allow me to circumvent the TPM requirement (it didn't). https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-requirement I then launched a fresh Boxes install from the Win 11 iso using these instructions: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/how-to-win11-in-gnome-boxes.html It is now possible to choose UEFI instead of BIOS in Boxes, so the only thing I needed to add to the configuration was the TPM line. When it got to my license code, however, my upgrade code wouldn't work for a fresh install. I started a new Win 10 install to be run parallel with my currently-working copy. I used the ctrl.blog VM configuration in the hope that Windows Update would consider my new machine eligible. On Fri, Feb 2, 2024 at 3:19 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

| From: Michael Hill via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | About seven years ago I needed to start using it full time, so I | bought a Windows 10 Pro license and an SSD.

Yeah. It is a matter of pride/stubbornness that I don't want to buy a second Windows license for the machine. I already involuntarily paid for one.

| My understanding is your ThinkPad should store the Windows license key | that came with it in a folder in Linux. I've seen mine but I haven't | tried using it.

At one point, licenses were stored (partly) in the firmware.

To get a fresh license code from my laptop for the second copy of Win 10, I ran: cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM The license code worked. Running Windows Update gave me 6 or 7 updates to install. After a number of restarts, not all of the updates were installed successfully and Windows 11 has not appeared as an update option. Hopefully there is more to this story but I won't burden the list with it. Mike