I recently bought a laptop from a friend of a friend..it has windows 8,1 pro on it.. but when i got it home and turned it on it says that windows is not activated....it ask for a key ..well nnedless to say the friend of the friend i bought it from don't know nothing .i was told to download the new windows 10 and that would fix the problem but it ask for a key as well...so i dont know what to do..
Sounds like the computer came with Home or Core and the friend of a friend updated it to Pro but does not have a valid key for it. You can't upgrade to Windows 10 until the current installation is activated, which you can't do because you don't have a valid key.
The following will show us what the laptop came with.
or use the built in recovery partition to restore the computer to it's factory new state. Please fill out your System Specs so we know what hardware you have.