Re: Legal XP Home key not working

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<Rauschman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote
I just reformatted a friend's HP Pavilion laptop with XP Home. In the
condition I received it, the computer would not even turn on, and I
didn't bother booting from a recovery disk or preinstallation
environment to run a keyfinder simply because there is a genuine
product label on the bottom of the laptop that states XP Home Edition
and has a product key. I installed XP with my own OEM XP Home disk
(because the laptop had OEM originally), and the key from the bottom
of the laptop was accepted without issue. Now I have SP2 installed and
the computer is saying the key is invalid. I tried to run activation
and change key by telephoning microsoft, but the key still will not be
accepted. I am guessing that this is because I'm trying to put an
original key into SP2. Any suggestions where I can go from here?


I'm not sure what the problem is, but the product key does not depend on the SP level. The same product key works whether it's Gold, SP1 or SP2.

--
Rock [MS-MVP User/Shell]

.

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