I installed Windows 8 recently and needed to activate it. I didn’t do this on the install since I didn’t have an Internet connection when I first set things up. This is a hardwired desktop, and I had to move it to my office to plug it in. However I didn’t have a spare monitor to use with it once it was moved, and when I connected over RDP to start setting things up, I realized it wasn’t activated.

No problem, I’ll just run the Activation from the Control Panel/Action Center. How to get to the Control Panel? I didn’t see an easy way, but I did remember that if I right clicked the desktop, I’d get a “Personalization” dialog, which was a sub-folder of Control Panel. That worked, I made my way to the Action center, which gave me a spot to click on to Activate things. I did and got an error:

Activation Error: Code 0x8007232b
DNS Name does not exist

That threw me. It said if I had issues, look for other methods in the
Control Panel. I didn’t see any, so I asked the Google what to do.

The first result was this KB article, which talked about the install being from a volume license of some sort. That was true, as I’d used my MSDN license to install. Since I didn’t have a local activation server, I used the first method of running the slmgr command line with my license key.

That worked great and I was up and running. I hadn’t seen that before, so it was an interesting experience.

Working with Win 8 across RDP, without a touch screen was interesting as well. Definitely a few things to get used to here.

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