Houdini is weak for today standards. You can download latest Stockfish ( it's free), import it on your houdini 4 chess program and forget about houdini engine activation. Just delete it.
Strange message: "Engine has not yet been activated"
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Hallo,
The product key you input requires the data to be stored in the registry. Try running the program as administrator and enter your key again. If this fails, try setting the W7 compatibility property and retry.
Hope this helps,
MfG
@kiwimotard: Thank you, I ran the installation program as administrator. After this I got the possibility to enter the product key again, as you have written. After this it worked without the strange message. Thank you very much!
@SwissFou: Thank you for this idea (Stockfish). I will try it in the next days. I will write here what happened.
Hallo,
I bought houdini4 for 100 euros around 2015. It runs on a computer with 4 cores. The operating system was always Windows 7 and I also have a product key. I had to enter this when activating the software (houdini4). Everything went well.
I installed Windows 10 a few days ago. Then I also installed the houdini4 software on Windows 10. Of course, I had to enter my product key again to activate the houdini4 software. Everything worked fine. But when I started the houdini4 software, a small pop-up window opened with the following message:
“houdini4 x64B: The engine has not yet been activated. Without activation it will analyze significantly weaker.”
The message does not appear on Windows 7, only on Windows 10. I checked which engines are available in the software (under Windows 10). There are only the standard engines that were automatically present after the installation of houdini4. But no others.
Could someone help me and let me know what is the reason for this strange message?