Windows Activiation

[#1]

A mate of mine, recently bought a new MOBO to replace his one that died. The system is an old packard bell, that had a socket A board. He mananged to get a socket A board, and also upgraded his HDD at the same time. Now..... I was under the impression that although an OEM windows licence was tied to the system, which M$ count as the MOBO, they did allow some leniancy if your MOBO died, and you couldnt get one the same, but got one as similar as you could. He tried to activate Win XP tonight, got told he would need to ring M$, which I told him to expect, but got asked some pretty wierd questions.  He explained the situation, and they asked him to give them some details off the Windows CD. He does not have one, as the silly sod reformatted his HDD, and was going to use the 2nd as storage. He got rid of all the partitions, including the recovery partition, and no CD was ever supplied wiht the system. I lent him mine but its not an orig, its a XP Home CD slipstreamed from an older SP1a CD, upgraded to SP3, so he has no access to a holographed CD. Looked all over of the orig but cannot find it. He does have the certificate of authenticity, but M$ would have none of it, and told him his copy of XP was illegal, and he should delete it. I was a little shocked at the attitude, as he has tried his best to keep things as much as they were as poss. Are M$ just being arses or are they correct, and he needs to buy another copy of XP home.

[#2]

It would only be "legal" if he reinstalled from an OEM disk from the correct manufacturer, presumably P-B.

[#3]

Cheers
I was always under the impression it wasnt the CD you were buying, but the licence to use the software, and therefore you could use any CD, as long as it was the correct one, ie OEM, Retail or VLK.  If what you are saying is correct, how does M$ know, and where do we sit with slipstreamed CDs, which is what he used.  I am not sure if his system was installed orig, with a master CD key, used by big OEMs, that use System prelocked activation, but surely there is a way around this, particularly on an OS, that m$ continually try to retire

[#4]

Those different versions are different and not interchangeable. With XP anyway.

[#5]

why not suggest to your friend that he try linux?  you could download and burn the .iso to disk for him and he would be free of this activation and genuine advantage nonsense.

[#6]

Thanks guys.
This does pose an interesting question.... What happens when microsoft eventually retire XP, and reinstalled systems require activiation, are they still going to keep the activiation servers going?

[#7]

Ring MS again and say your a computer company repairing a customers pc with a new MB they should just give you the numbers. We did it 100's of times at the shop they dont bother if its a company

[#8]

Thanks Samuria,  will try that.
Cheers