The Windows Tips Page

How to Activate Windows for Cheap

Buying a retail copy of Windows is rather costly. To save money we may purchase Windows licenses from online vendors such as MyDigitalLicences to get big savings.

Checking the Trust Pilot score revealed that they are well trusted, and despite my initial skepticism, my license for Windows 11 worked perfectly to activate the software.

How to Backup Windows

A very reliable way to back up and restore Windows that I use is called AOMEI Backupper Standard. This may be downloaded for free. It can be set to do scheduled backups, incremental backups, or full backups.

We can also create bootable media with it to recover our OS if it fails to boot.

How to Prevent Windows From Applying DRM to Media Files

DRM is Digital Rights Management where media files may be locked to a particular device, and it is only possible to play the files on that device. Of course, this is a great annoyance for the user.

However, in Linux environments DRM is not supported as far as I know. But if you have Windows on your system, it could possibly detect the files and apply DRM. I had this happen to me years ago where all of my music collection was DRMed and became unplayable after I upgraded my computer.

To avoid this problem, one solution is to never play the files using any Microsoft software such as Windows Media Player. Also, keep a backup of your files that Windows never gets to see.

Windows scans hard drives looking for NTFS partitions. This is the file format that Windows uses. But Linux systems use file formats that are invisible to Windows such as ext4. So it is safe to store a backup on these drives.

Making the folders read-only for non-administrator users would seem to be a good idea. User Access Control settings allow for getting notifications when a program wants to make changes to your computer.

How to Prevent Windows From Making Disk Drives Read Only

When shutting down Windows, the NTFS disk drives are locked from write access by Linux OS. I think that this is so that Windows will restart faster.

But, to avoid this problem, remember to hold down the Shift key when selecting shut down. This should fully shut down the PC without locking the files.