One of the Mums at school has a problem with her Netbook: she was supposed to enter the Win7 product key within 20 days to activate it. But she didn't and entering the product key now has no effect, it just comes up as invalid. This has resulted in being unable to type or save documents in MS Works, amongst other things. From what I understand, I don't think there is any sort of system restore CD, but the computer has no disc drive anyway. I suggested reloading Windows from USB with an .iso I might possibly acquire, and then activating it with her completely unused kosher product key. But there's about 8 different versions of Windows 7, and I can't find a copy of Basic to download. So, is there a simpler solution to this? WTF is the deal with the 20 day limit on activation? Any help would be very much appreciated. Oh, and I'm useless and can't remember make or model of computer. And no, there's absolutely no chance of her letting me put Ubuntu and Open Office on there either. Ta very much.
You need to enter the valid key that will be on the label on the bottom of the laptop and then click register while connected to the internet. If you have no internet connection of if registration fails then select the option to register over the telephone. You will then be presented with a code on the screen and a telephone number to call. Call the number while in front of the laptop and follow the automated instructions you are given. Hope this helps.
With OEM PCs, be it desktop OR laptop OR netbook the BIOS (assuming you have one and your machine doesn't use EFI) has a section for OEMs to store license data for Windows (I'd assume Linux doesn't have/need this particularly since most OEMs don't offer a Linux solution anyway) that isn't easily overwritten. It can be corrupted but it is difficult to overwrite it as I discovered when trying to modify a laptop BIOS to incorporate a legitimate copy's info of Win7 Ultimate when it came with Win7 Home Basic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Locked_Preinstallation The nitty gritty about it. Basically it is written at the factory and never again as BIOS updates just overwrite the portion that contains all but the SLP data. I'd assume future updates leave this spot as a wildcard as to leave it alone but obviously it gets written by something but I couldn't figure out how to properly overwrite the data on my laptop. I'd start by dumping the BIOS using this: http://jacky5488.myweb.hinet.net/ Don't worry you can't really mess anything up by dumping the thing, just don't write anything. Check to see if the SLP/SLIC data is intact, if it isn't this could be why Windows 7 didn't AUTOMATICALLY (as it should) activate as an OEM copy as soon as it saw this data in the BIOS. In theory (to the best of my knowledge) you could install Windows XP or Windows Vista on that netbook and have it automatically activate too (not that you'd want to). If it isn't there you might be able to edit the BIOS itself to fix this with other utilities out there (that are typically rather grey in legality) and reflash it yourself fixing this problem. This is assuming that the BIOS can be edited, you have the cajones to flash it making a potential brick out of it, and the version installed is a legally/properly installed OEM edition. If that isn't your bag and you just wanna try to restore it.... As for the restore cd: likely one never existed. HP lets you create restore DVDs once with an app on the machine once you start using it or you can pay them $10 or so when initially buying the machine so that they may create them for you. I don't know about Dell anymore but they used to ship the machine with restore disks or at least an OEM copy of the OS. 99% of the time these days there is a partition hidden from the OS (that can be viewed with a live Linux boot disk, usually) that contains an app and the requisite data to restore the machine to factory fresh (and usually without the crap/bloatware it came with). This is usually started by pressing some key/key combo during POST that sometimes is advertised during POST but not always. Depends solely on the laptop model at hand but google almost always had the necessary key combos to get this started. Keep in mind it WILL likely wipe all of the data on the working OS partition before overwriting the data from the restore partition so backup everything first! I'd suggest making an image that you can mount on a secondary machine so you can cherry pick what you want without losing anything. Nothing more fun than thinking you backed up everything they wanted and then finding out their home movies of their grandkids were in a directory they didn't tell you about and now it's gone for good. ...nice wall of text I wrote there.
