W7 Activation not needed?

Your colleague (the 'jerk at work') is almost certainly using a hacked copy of Windows - and once you get into such areas of La-La Land then all bets are off as to how a system responds to any given situation, as many hacks also contain malware, rootkits and other nasties.

NoelDP said:

M1GU31 said:

windows will eventually lock you out of your system if you let it pass the 30 day trial by puting a black desktop and in the Conner saying to activate and if you don't after a while it just won't let you get to your computer without activating it. Seen it happen before, every time you will try to boot to win 7 it will bug you about activating and not let you on your desktop anymore.

Windows 7 does NOT 'lock you out' of your system - except in some relatively minor respects.
Vista RTM did (SP2 does pretty much the same as Win7)
Win 7 will bring up a notification on every boot that the system is not genuine, and requires activation, and you can cancel out of that and get to a fully-functional desktop. However, if MSE is installed, it will also throw a fit, and after 30 days of non-genuine status, it will disable itself.

Then why did it lock me out? I had to reinstall to get back in and put my key, i couldn't even get in the desktop it just said to activate it so i just reinstalled then activated it with fresh install,anyways it was after 30 days passed and after like not activating for like 4 days it would lock me out sometimes.

Possibly because there were other problems as well as activation/validation problems - I maintain an unactivated VM - and it has NEVER prevented me from doing what I need to do.

Activation/validation problems will bring up a flag at boot - and it's easy to cancel the flag, and enter the OS without restriction (except for certain add-ons such as MSE)

Please post an MGADiag report for your current install - it may be revealing.