Kinguin.Net is an on-line marketplace for games, but other software as well. The company is based in Hong Kong and the sellers on the website can be from anywhere. They sell only product keys, which are delivered to buyers via E-mail, but keep a copy in the buyer's account (probably in the seller's account too) on Kinguin.net.
Kinguin.net guarantees that all product keys are genuine and are only sold once, to one buyer. They also offer a 30 day money back guarantee called "buyer's protection", which costs 1USD / 1EURO (depending on the region of the buyer).
NOTE: the most important thing to verify before buying a product key from Kinguin.net is the regional limitation, which should look like:
OR locked to your region.Personally I have bought 2 Microsoft Windows licenses about a month ago: Windows 10 Pro OEM for myself and Windows 8 Pro OEM for my girlfriend. They were both at about the same price. My PC is based on Haswell platform with 6GB RAM, that's why I chose Windows 10, but my gf has only a Celeron E3200
(Core 2 Duo generation) with 4GB RAM, so I thought there could be compatibility issues with Windows 10 and went with 8.1 instead.On my PC I installed Windows 10 PRO
from a USB stick (the image requires only about 3.2GB space on the flash drive), introduced the product key from the scanned sticker they sent me, and it installed without any problems on my Kingston V300 60GB SSD
in about 15 minutes.On my girlfriend's PC the installation was much slower, even though she has a 120GB Patriot Blast SSD
(connected to SATA2) and 4GB DDR3-800MHz RAM in dual channel mode, the processor only scores about 1400 points in Passmark, so it's half as fast as my Haswell Celeron G1820
, which scores 2800 points in Passmark and has SATA3 with AHCI.Upgrading to Windows 10 can be reversed in 30 days, so I tried it on my girlfriend's computer. It took about 2 hours to upgrade, but the result was unexpected. It installed and activated without any problems and even automatically installed drivers for the outdated ATI Radeon 5450 1GB
video card (and for everything else). To reduce the boot time, a played around a bit with the page file and hiberfile, and found that the optimal choice is to leave hibernation on and the page file off. Now the PC boots in about 10 seconds (measured from after the POST/BIOS LOGO screen). Needless to say my girlfriend is very pleased, as she was used to Windows 8.1, which needed about 40 seconds to boot up for whatever reason.In conclusion, I recommend upgrading to Windows 10, even if you have a Celeron from the Core 2 Duo generation (or newer). They are all dual core processors and offer impressive performance at rock bottom prices, assuming that you install sufficient RAM and an SSD. Kinguin.net is the best choice if you have to buy a lot of licenses, or simply don't have the 100 USD for a retail license, but want to enjoy all the advantages of an activated and updated Windows OS.
UPDATE1:
A month after I purchased my Windows 10 license, my PC burned down, except for the SSD. I replaced the motherboard with an ASUS H81M-K
(same chipset as my old Asrock H81M-DGS 2.0
), bought the same Celeron G1820 processor, 4GB DDR3 RAM and a new cheap PSU.I was worried about Windows not accepting the configuration change, but everything was absolutely OK. When I first booted the new system, the message "updating devices" appeared under the Windows loading logo. After it finished loading and I logged in, Windows kept bugging me about my Microsoft account, so I clicked on the message. It loaded the Microsoft account page, and instructed me to verify/update my account details, that's it. I didn't really change anything, just clicked save, and everything went back to normal. My Windows is activated and fully functional - I didn't even have to reinstall it with the new configuration.