The Blog
Guides, analysis and licensing advice for Windows, Office, Visual Studio and more — from the Software Supplies team.
Office 2016 reached the end of its support life on 14 October 2025. No more security patches, no more fixes — and its supported connection to Microsoft 365 email and cloud services ended two years before that. If you’re still running it, the question isn’t whether to upgrade. It’s which route costs you least. Office […]
Every UK student with an active university email address qualifies for 30% off every licence we sell — Office, Windows, Visual Studio, all of it. Here’s what you actually get for free through your university, where that access stops, and why the smartest time to use the discount is before you graduate, not after. Office […]
Office “Unlicensed Product” in the title bar, a code you’ve never seen before, and most of your Office features quietly disabled — activation errors are rarely as serious as they look. Most have a specific, fixable cause. Here’s what the common codes actually mean and the order worth trying fixes in, before you assume the […]
Windows There’s no single place a Windows product key lives any more. Depending on how your PC was set up, it might be sitting in a command output, tucked in an old purchase email, printed on a sticker that doesn’t exist on modern hardware, or not retrievable at all because your licence was never a […]
Microsoft 365 “Copilot” now means at least three different things depending on where you’re clicking it from — and only one of them costs anything extra. Here’s what Microsoft Copilot (free) actually gives you, what you’re paying for when Copilot turns up as a line item in Microsoft 365, and whether most people need the […]
Windows 11 If PC Health Check says your PC “doesn’t currently meet Windows 11 requirements,” you still have a real option. Here’s exactly how people install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware in 2026, what you actually give up by doing it, and the one thing the bypass never gets you around: a genuine licence to […]
Excel works fine for project management — until it doesn’t. The question isn’t whether Excel is the wrong tool. It’s whether your project has grown past what a spreadsheet can sensibly handle. This article draws that line clearly. When Excel isn’t enough Microsoft Project Professional 2024 Perpetual licence · instant delivery · no subscription £239 […]