My OEM XP wants to activate with an unknown serial

[HotelUser]

I've finally gotten rid of Vista on my Acer, by reimaging with a Gateway XP recovery disk.

Here's the dilemma, after installing (and I was surprised it worked) XP wanted to activate and it failed. It came back and told me it failed and showed me the serial number it tried to activate with, it wasn't the serial on my COA sticker. Not that it mattered..because the OEM's sticker failed too.

I was just wondering if I asked Microsoft if they'd freak at me for using Gateway recovery disks with my Acer.

[Rapidshare]

Is gateway another brand? like acer?


Nahh, they shouldnt know what pc it been installed on ect

[HotelUser]

Is gateway another brand? like acer?


Nahh, they shouldnt know what pc it been installed on ect

Yeah, but Gateways are made by Acer. Anyways I've managed to activate it with another OEM key on a gateway computer. However I'd still like to know why a totally random activation key that was not on the COA sticker was on the recovery disk.

[benno123]

The whole point of an OEM disc is that it's for use on a single computer. It will install on any computer, but activation will fail because it's already been tied to a computer. And yes when you enter an activation key it will change from what you entered. It will put OEM at the start of it too.

[HotelUser]

The whole point of an OEM disc is that it's for use on a single computer. It will install on any computer, but activation will fail because it's already been tied to a computer. And yes when you enter an activation key it will change from what you entered. It will put OEM at the start of it too.

I'm not using this on any other computers, plus, I've used the same OEM disk on two computers at once before. Windows activation was supposed to have built in the key on the COA sticker, but it didn't. It's activated now, I used another key on the COA sticker.

Anyways this is sort of solved, so thread closed.