this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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It seems the other answers already covered what you needed to know, so I won't be redundant here. Pro tip: if you rarely use your Windows installation, you might consider moving it into a virtual machine that you can conveniently boot from within your running Linux system. This way you wouldn't need the dual boot anymore, which might be desirable for various reasons.
Another big plus of that approach: If your laptop or PC breaks, you can just move the VM image with Windows exactly like any other file you have backed up (you do backups, don't you?) to the new hardware and use it as before. This esoecially breaks the problem of forced OS upgrades if the new hardware does not support the old windows version, or you do not have the installer and license keys any more, but the new Windows version does not support your old documents, media formats, or pheriperals like scanners.
Also, if you modify your Windows install and it might break, you can just make a snapshot of the VM image - which is a copy of a file - and restore it when needed.
You can legally buy second-market OEM licenses. They are not that expensive, and do not expire. And, older versions of Windows are much slimmer and boot much faster, though it is not a good idea to connect them to the Internet - instead, one would block connections between VM and Internet. Which is anyway much better from a privacy perspective.
But if the Windows has an OEM license, it can't be used inside a VM, as far as I understand.
You can just use an activation script. Even though technically Windows won't be activated using the OEM license in a VM, the license is still present on the machine. So legally Windows is still licensed. To get around the thing not automatically activating, an activation script is an easy fix.
This is a good activation script:
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts