I recently updated from Windows 8 Developer Preview to the full version. Instead of doing a direct upgrade or installing from scratch, I burned Windows 8 to a CD and through the options given, told Windows 8 that I’d like to upgrade without saving any any old data, apps, profile information. I was basically installing from scratch, but the Windows 8 was saving my data off to the side in a Windows.old file.
I started up my new installation of Windows 8 and began editing my profile, but was warned that I wouldn’t be able to personalize anything until I activated my account. When trying to activate, I was given the error “Windows cannot activate right now. Try again later” – or something along those lines.
Through some internet searching, I learned that I needed to run the following command as an administrator:
slmgr.vbs -ipk "YOUR_PRODUCT_KEY"
After running the command, my product was activated and I could do anything I wanted. I rebooted for good measure. Screenshot below for you visual folks:
Thanks for the post Dan. It helped me a lot.
Great to hear! Cheers!
Hey mate sorry but it doesnot work…It says insufficient privelages……mail me at mynameisbilla11@gmail.com
Hi Bill A,
Typically if you get an “Access is denied – Insufficient Privileges” while running commands it’s because you aren’t running command prompt as an administrator (also called running it elevated). Be sure to open command prompt as an administrator. You can hit your windows key, do a search for “cmd” then right click the app and choose to run it as an administrator, or you can browse to c:\Windows\System32, find cmd.exe, right click and run as an administrator. Either way you do it, make sure you’re running it elevated. You won’t get the privileges error.
Let me know if this helps. I’m pretty sure my reply will email you a notice.
Cheers!
[...] had originally posted a while back in regards to getting the “Windows can’t activate right now…” error in [...]
Thank you for your post!!!!!
No idea how you found this one.
Glad it helped. Cheers!
I tried what u said and after that some kind of dialogue box came up it was saying about windows script host and a lot of options are written under it if I press ok another box appears with lots of more options and this happens for at least 4 times
what to do please help me.
I’m sorry yugansh, but I haven’t seen that issue before. Which version of Windows 8 are you trying to activate? And what are the exact errors of the box? I’m surprised, we’ve had such great success with this.
Thanks, this worked for me! I installed Windows 8 in Virtualbox running on a Windows 7 machine and got this message when trying to activate Windows 8. Command worked perfectly!