Microsoft Activation Stupidity

I thought MS OS design has, how shall we say, "issues", but this takes
the cake....

I had an old PC with XP, an Pentium MMX @233mhz and it barely ran, but
it did. Then I get a another "hand me down" pc that is a PII 400Mhz.

So, I put the HDD from the old into the new.

XP was much better than 98 at detecting all the new hardware..., and,
not totally unexpected, XP warns that since there were significant
hardware changes that XP must be re-activated withing 3 days. Okay, I
can do that.

But then, get this... after the reboot (for the new found hardware) XP
tries to logon but says that it can't, that "This copy of Windows must
be activated ... before you can log on."

Then, after clicking "OK" XP proceeds to log off.

And then XP proceeds to try and log on again, with the same This copy
of Windows must be activated ... before you can log on." message.

It's stuck in a loop with no way to exit!

Same with safe mode!

So I am hosed. And people wonder why people hate Microsoft?

There just may be a way to solve this problem. But to do so it to,
what? Spend tens of hours posting stupid questions to Usenet in hope of
a non-arrogant MS MVP that actually has something useful to say about
this? Hours of searching the Web for solutions, inevitably finding
hundreds of people complaining about the same kind of problems all
tripping over one another but never actually finding a solution? Call
Microsoft? Where's the number? I have to did up the original box/manual
that the OS came in. (It is not a Dell/Getway/etc., I can't call the
mfg. It's way past any warranty.)

If you are going to say re-install XP from scratch don't bother to
answer, that is an unexceptable answer, although that is probably what
I will have to do.

Hopefully, I am just missing something obvious.

--

.

Relevant Pages

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