Windows activation

[Hyote]

The only thing I learned since the writing of the post is that unactivated Windows will let you use exclusive fullscreen, but the watermark will be rendered through compositing anyway. I don't think it's worth testing because I only speculate about HWID activation causing problems that weren't measured with game performance or latency tests anyways.
The Business Edition versions can be found here if someone is interested:
https://files.rg-adguard.net/version/f0 ... 6fefbe94c5

[KeepAjen]

I was still testing this in the last few weeks with an unactivated Windows 11 and now I moved on to using Windows 10 Pro Business Edition. This ISO supposedly uses KMS server activation instead of HWID and so far it stayed consistent with no floatiness.

I also got this video recommended and I was shocked at how this looks like floaty mouse input with at least 0.5 seconds of delay:

Interesting that someone else mentions KMS-based activation - I've noticed similar behavior.

I tested both HWID and KMS activations on clean installs of Windows 10/11, and frankly, KMS-activated deployments (especially those using Pro VL editions) often seemed faster, especially in terms of input consistency. Perhaps it's placebo, but I repeated the process several times and noticed fewer weird stutters or frame inconsistencies.

For testing, I used a lightweight local KMS emulator - no bloat, no autorun, just something that manually triggers activation for a certain period. This helped get rid of the watermark and made the system more “established”, if that makes sense.

I used KMSPico, downloaded it from here https:// www . kmspico . lc, overall I had no problems. But be careful when downloading such tools from unverified sources.