Yesterday, as I started to set up my PC to start playing around with the Minds stack, I got stuck a few times on the Elasticsearch provisioning step. No idea why. I just kept trying over and over. At the fourth time, I decided to restart my PC but still nothing. Then I eventually checked the troubleshooting part of the instructions to see if they were any help. As it turns out, for that very specific error there was a fix. Try to deactivate WSL. Seemingly simple, unless you’re running on Windows 10 Home and that the only reason you can use Docker there is thanks to WSL since the 20H2 update. So now I can either stop setting up the whole Minds stack or buy the Windows 10 Pro upgrade.
Checking the store, it’s £119.99, I could do without the expense but people probably made bigger sacrifices to help build Minds. In my fortunate position, it’s a price I can afford to pay even though I did my best to avoid it all these years. But now is the time to stand up and help support an awesome project like that of Minds and this is a price I am willing to pay.
Unfortunately, I ran into the worst kind of issue. The upgrade failed and my activation key was gone. I restart my laptop thinking it will be fine and it seems like it. I can see some Windows upgrade shenanigans going on. However, when I’m back on, the system asks me to activate Windows. I click the link and not only the activation fails but I now have Windows 10 Enterprise edition. The confusion seizes me as I am grappling with this oddity.
From there, I try to contact Microsoft support but get nothing other than a bot. An unhelpful one that didn’t manage to help whatsoever. At that point, I start searching online like a madman what is going on. I can be unlucky but I can’t be that unlucky that I am the first person to whom this happens.
The first few results suggest me to edit the registry which is risky as I won’t know what I’m doing there. Some others suggest contacting Microsoft support. After about an hour searching, I have a glimmer of hope. A user dealt with the same situation before. The exact same one. His upgrade to Windows 10 Professional from the Microsoft store led him to have an Enterprise version as well. People suggested him to reset his PC and other kinds of nonsense. I actually went very close to a reset but didn’t feel like setting up all my apps unless it’s my last resort. I’d rather cut my life into pieces.
Eventually, I found an answer I liked from the OP. He called Microsoft support which gave him an activation key after validating he was a genuine purchaser. I did the same but the number I called would be a bot telling me the same stuff than the chatbot before. At that point, I give up and start closing windows and tabs. That is until I end up again on that chatbot I opened earlier. It was asking for feedback. I give it only to realise that the feedback is not the end. Indeed, the flow continues towards a step where I get the option to be called which I obviously go for.
A couple of minutes later, I am on the phone with Sanjay a friendly member of the Microsoft customer support team. After I give him all the facts surrounding my issue, he guides me through a few steps to validate my purchase is genuine. This goes rather quickly and eventually, he gives me an activation key that switches my Windows setup from non-activated Enterprise to an active Professional edition. Finally, I can move on with setting up my Minds stack.
