How to Activate Windows 11 Permanently for Free (Lifetime + No Watermarks)

By now, you might have installed the latest Microsoft Windows 11 on your PC and thinking about how to activate it. This guide will show you exactly how to activate Windows 11 permanently for free. We’ll also give some quick workarounds to remove the ‘activate windows’ watermark on your screen.

If you have an original copy of Windows 10 and you just upgrade it with the latest developer build of Windows 11, you can easily customize the settings on your system. But for others, knowing how to activate Windows 11 without a product key is a must to customize various things on their PC like changing wallpaper, themes, etc.

So without further ado, let’s see how to activate Windows 11 with CMD and an activation batch file.

Steps to Activate Windows 11 Permanently

1. First of all, you need to disable the virus protection on your PC. Fret not. This is because we are going to use a batch file that Windows defender will consider as malicious. Go to Settings by using the shortcut Windows key + i.
2. From the left pane, select Privacy & Security.
3. Once inside the privacy and security settings, click on the Open Windows Security button.
4. In the next window, click on the Virus & Threat protection icon as shown in the screenshot below.
5. Now, click on Manage settings.
6. Then turn off the Real-time protection feature by toggling the button. Now you’ve successfully disabled the in-built security of Windows and it will not block the activation batch file that we are going to use in a minute.
7. Head over to this link and copy the complete activation code.
8. On your desktop, right-click and create a new text document using Notepad.
9. Now, paste the copied code into it and click File and then Save as.
10. Choose desktop as your target location and name it Windows11activation.bat and click Save. Make sure that the file extension is .bat. This is important.
11. Right-click on the file and run it as administrator.
12. Consequently, it will open the command windows and start activating your Windows 11 PC. The screen will look like this.
13. Once the activation process is completed you will see a message saying “Product activated successfully”.
14. Now, to confirm your Windows 11 is activated, go to Settings > Activation. Here you will see the Activation state as Active with a green tick mark. Your screen will look like this.

That’s it! Your Windows 11 is now activated.

Now, what’s left? Yeah, removing the watermark. Read on.

How to Remove ‘Activate Windows’ Watermark

Getting rid of the activate watermark is pretty simple and straightforward. Use these steps for that:

1. First, you need to create a new Notepad document on your desktop as we did for the activation.

2. Now, copy and paste the below code into the Notepad.

@echo off
taskkill /F/ IM explorer.exe
explorer.exe
exit

3. Then you need to save it as a batch file. Just name it as remove.bat. And again, the .bat file extension is important. Otherwise, it won’t work.

4. Run the file as administrator.

That’s all.

Note that you won’t see any changes immediately after running the batch file. To take the effect of it you need to restart your PC. Once you restart and land on the desktop you will not see the annoying watermark.

The methods explained here are tested and perfectly working at the time of writing this article. This may or may not work for the coming builds and upgrades. If you have any issues, please let me know in the comments.