I’ve been trying to clean up my office downstairs and finally got around to rebuilding a machine for a family friend of ours that was so slow I recommended an OS rebuild. I’m only doing it so they have a spare machine which is why I took my sweet time.
Of course I didn’t have any recover disks and the HD didn’t have a recovery partition so I used a copy of XP sp3 I had lying around. Figured if it the serial wasn’t good (build in OEM…Dell) then I’d just put in the legit key on the side of the box.
Of course once you get it up and running and Windows XP flags an install as non genuine getting it to change is a total pain in the ass.
First I had to force it to allow me to put in a new serial using this guide:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/productkeysactivation/ht/changexpkey.htm
And then even that wasn’t good enough. No amount of deleting registry keys or startup programs would help. Finally I found a link that said to go to this site to help diag a situation where the serial is valid but the Windows Genuine Activation can’t complete:
http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/diag/
I suppose it’s all my fault really but it shouldn’t be this hard when you have a legit key. Just goes again to show that DRM only exists to punish the people who pay for stuff.
Oh and on a side note, I’m going to have to find new hosting it seems. I’ve been on this server for about 10 years but it seems my good luck has run out. The bad news is that the google ads don’t come close to paying for the monthly cost. The only good news is that my bandwidth needs see to be pretty low based on my logs. I don’t have much time left before this goes poof so I need to find something here pretty quickly. 
