i have never in my life paid for an OS (41 years) but somewhere in the past (between vista and 7 or 8) my windows installation was digitally certified and every new windows installation used with that ms account was legit. i don't know why or how, but then again, i also never once in my life had windows restart my system because of updates by  itself, even though i NEVER changed anything about getting updates with the exception of enabling updates for other MS products.<br>if an update requires a restart, i get notified. but i am able to ignore that notice as long as i wish to and the OS won't restart by itself.<br><br>idk, maybe i am blessed by the microsoft gods or sth.