I have windows 8 and its been working fine since I bought my laptop. In the last few weeks ive gotten a windows activation error 0xC004F074 saying I need to activate windows 8. Ive always had windows 8 since purchasing my laptop so ive no idea how to solve this error.

Has it been activated before? You must contact the manufacturer of your laptop and ask them for activation as it's an OEM build.

You may also see:

When trying to activate you get 0xC004F074 with description "The Key Management Server (KMS) is unavailable":

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974998

Hello,

License Information (Windows 8)

1. Right click on the Start button
2. Click on Command prompt
3. Inside the Command Prompt windows copy and paste the following command
   licensingdiag.exe -report "%userprofile%\Desktop\report.txt" -log "%userprofile%\Desktop\repfiles.cab"
4. Once finished please go to your desktop -> You will see two files report.txt and repfiles.cab
5. Please open up report.txt and past the contents back into this thread