Bypassing having to activate Win 10 in order to use personalization options?

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Pozidriv

New Member
I bought NTLite last month and have been messing around with it. I still use Win 7 x64 as my OS. Win 10 won't run on this older PC's hardware, but I installed Oracle's VirtualBox so I could at least mess around creating some stripped down Win 10 ISO's.

The first time I installed Win 10 in VirtualBox I used the current 22H2 ISO just so I could play around with it a little and see what it was like. Once it was installed and I got to the Desktop I saw the message that I was unable to customize anything until I activated it. I've since used NTLite 3 times to strip off a bunch of stuff and try out those ISO's.

Here's the issue: After I installed the first of those ISO's I *was* able to customize the Desktop with a different color and unlock the Taskbar and move it to the top of the screen.... but I don't know what I did that enabled me to do that.

Any ideas?

Despite having the unlocked Desktop, there was plenty of room for improvement with that ISO, so I made ISO's 2 & 3. They've both been better than the first one, but whatever setting I used in the first one that unlocked the Desktop, I haven't been able to replicate it in the other ISO's. In the end it's not a huge deal, since whenever I permanently install Win 10 I'm obviously going to activate it and then I'll have access to personalizing the Desktop, but in the meantime while I'm messing around I'd like to have an unlocked Desktop if I could. Thanks.
 
You can tweak and enable advanced options with Winaero or find reg tweaks that helps to make some changes.
 
NTLite will never bypass Windows activation mechanisms and locks.
It can edit some of those desktop settings, as they are just a reg entry, as Kasual alluded.
You must have done something else, maybe Windows activated online on its own, it tends to do that if it once was on that machine.
 
I don't think so, Nuhi. I don't have a Win 10 license and Win 10 has never been on this PC before (it can't even run Win 10 with the exception of it being installed in VirtualBox).

I don't know what I did that unlocked the Desktop settings on that first ISO I made. Just dumb luck I guess. Oddly enough, even though the Desktop personalization settings are grayed out in the current Win 10 ISO install I'm using, I'm able to drag the Taskbar to the top of the screen.

Feel free to delete this thread if you want to. I'm not trying to get around activating Win 10, and being able to move the Taskbar to the top of the screen was the main thing I was interested in anyway, and apparently it's unlocked even though it says it isn't. Weird.
 
You may have digitally activated this VM, by prior MS Account association. I've had that behavior on one VM, it would auto-activate on future re-installs even if I used a local account. The "hardware ID" is recognized from before.
 
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