Hi everyone, i'm having an issue getting 2 old PC's resurrected, 1 packard bell imedia 5021, and 1 dell optiplex gx260, both running P4 CPU's, pretty vintage, but still fine for basic web browsing and light tasks.
Both had dead hard drives, hence the reason they were not in use, and had been sitting in my girlfriends garage for 2 or 3 years, i have swapped out the dead IDE drives out of each one for 2 80gb drives that i had in my pile of spares, and i installed XP home edition on both machines, all up and running, lovely.
Except, that although the product key on the case of each machine was fine to do the installations, neither will activate windows, it just keeps coming up with the screen again and asks me if i have mistyped it, i haven't.
I then tried swapping the keys over, tried key 1 on PC 2 and visa versa, neither will activate.
I then remembered a long dead PC i have at home, which is now just an empty case, also an XP sp2 machine, that key will not activate either machine either.
I wondered if it was because i used my XP SP2 disk, which is obviously a different physical install CD to the one that would have come with the machines originally, and also if the installation of SP3 before i tried to activate would be causing this, but from what i can find, the key on a machines sticker isn't tied to the physical install CD that comes with that PC, and also the service pack isn't an issue either, and that as long as the version of windows is the same, the service pack is irrelevant, unless i was trying to use an SP3 key to activate SP1a or SP2 for example, but that's not the case.
I'm at a loss as to why i cant get either activated, as i've even built whole machines up from parts and used an old key from another case in the past on more than one occasion and they have activated without issue.
Realistically im pretty sure that im going to have to get on the phone to M$ tomorrow to try and resolve this issue, but before i do i just wondered if there is any outside chance that there will be a way i can sort this out without resorting to that, as i have a legit windows cd and legit keys, so its not like i'm trying to do anything underhand, although i have heard that microsoft are pretty difficult to obtain replacement keys from, even for an OS that's 12 years and 3 versions ago old.
I'm not holding my breath, but many thanks in advance...
Both had dead hard drives, hence the reason they were not in use, and had been sitting in my girlfriends garage for 2 or 3 years, i have swapped out the dead IDE drives out of each one for 2 80gb drives that i had in my pile of spares, and i installed XP home edition on both machines, all up and running, lovely.
Except, that although the product key on the case of each machine was fine to do the installations, neither will activate windows, it just keeps coming up with the screen again and asks me if i have mistyped it, i haven't.
I then tried swapping the keys over, tried key 1 on PC 2 and visa versa, neither will activate.
I then remembered a long dead PC i have at home, which is now just an empty case, also an XP sp2 machine, that key will not activate either machine either.
I wondered if it was because i used my XP SP2 disk, which is obviously a different physical install CD to the one that would have come with the machines originally, and also if the installation of SP3 before i tried to activate would be causing this, but from what i can find, the key on a machines sticker isn't tied to the physical install CD that comes with that PC, and also the service pack isn't an issue either, and that as long as the version of windows is the same, the service pack is irrelevant, unless i was trying to use an SP3 key to activate SP1a or SP2 for example, but that's not the case.
I'm at a loss as to why i cant get either activated, as i've even built whole machines up from parts and used an old key from another case in the past on more than one occasion and they have activated without issue.
Realistically im pretty sure that im going to have to get on the phone to M$ tomorrow to try and resolve this issue, but before i do i just wondered if there is any outside chance that there will be a way i can sort this out without resorting to that, as i have a legit windows cd and legit keys, so its not like i'm trying to do anything underhand, although i have heard that microsoft are pretty difficult to obtain replacement keys from, even for an OS that's 12 years and 3 versions ago old.
I'm not holding my breath, but many thanks in advance...