Re: Curious Win 7 activation issues on new Dell?

Gary Baldi wrote:
I've just taken delivery of two new Dells for the neighbour's kids,
one desktop and one laptop. Both have Win 7 64-bit Home Premium.

The neighbour asked if I'd mind reinstalling the OS, drivers and apps
from scratch as, like me, they don't like the trial stuff that Dell
bundles with their units. Fair enough.

So I start with the laptop and within about 40 minutes I'm staring at
the bright blue Win 7 desktop. Lovely. So I go into Control Panel/
System to change the name of the workgroup that both pc's will live in
and observe that Windows is already activated.

No surprise there, I wasn't even asked for a product key during the
install routine which has been standard procedure on all the Dell's
I've worked on over the years, my understanding has always been that
the setup routine does a BIOS check to ensure it's being installed on
a Dell.

So, onto the desktop. Again within about 35 minutes I'm at the
desktop except, in Control Panel/System I see that I have three days
until automatic activation takes place? Strange. The option to
"activate now", when clicked, simply throws up an error message
telling me the product key I entered isn't valid?!

Um, excuse me? What product key, I haven't entered any!?

Any ideas why the same OS behaves differently on two different
machines?

I've googled "3 days left for activation" and got nearly 9,000,000
hits so someone else is feeling this too, some of the comments I read
have claimed they've been merrily running the various OS's for months
and months and now have received this message.

I assume MS have dropped something sinister into one of their updates?

Anyone got any thoughts?

why did the installation with the dell provided windows 7 machine work with a desktop an not a laptop? who knows. i too recently found that a dell provided windows 7 pro dvd that came with a vostros 1700 required manual activation (had to reinstall the defective factory image - thanks dell). this surprised me and reminded me of a dell provided windows xp pro cd i once received with a latitude laptop that also required manual activation despite every other dell oem windows xp cd not needing it. this activation stuff really is a nuisance and what is so absurd about it is that before windows 7 was even released someone came out with something called "7loader by hazar" that actually activates a windows 7 installation. of course microsoft chases down this software wherever it is posted so there are tons of dead links for it all over the internet. but it is remarkable that it exists, and shows how truly meaningless the activation process is, and shows that windows activation only punishes legitimate users of their software and doesn't little to actually stop those that wish to pirate it.
.

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