Windows

[buttons-and-bows]

it's activated it's self, either that or i did something right o

[cambrensis]

it's activated it's self, either that or i did something right o

Windows moves in mysterious ways! The only thing I had left was to hit F12 and try one of the repair sequences offered!!
Well done, buttons!

[johnwash1]

it's activated it's self, either that or i did something right o

To activate it phones home, i.e. it contacts Microsoft's servers. If it finds the details of your computer have been seen before, it does the activation. Probably your internet connection was slow, or MS were having a bad day.

Even if devices are changed in your computer it will still be activated, provided not too much is changed at once. For example this week I took a duff hard drive out of someone's laptop, put in an SSD, installed Windows 10 from scratch, and soon after connecting it was activated.

To my astonishment it even restored the desktop wallpaper that the user previously had (a personal photo). So Windows even invades your privacy by keeping your wallpaper!!! It wasn't a worry for this particular user, but I can imagine some folk might use that as a convenient place to store stuff. For example, many years ago, on a company XP desktop, I stored a photo of our project plan on my desktop, so that I'd be reminded of it at the start of every day before opening any programs. People would certainly not have been happy if such material was going off site.