Re-activation of XP after new motherboard installed

axipher

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Mar 2, 2010
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Hey community, I have a slight problem.

My friend had an old computer that had a perfectly legal copy of Windows XP SP2 installed on. The CPU and/or motherboard fried so I swapped it out for my old/new M4A78LT-M LE and Athlon II X3 440 and PQI DDR3 RAM. It loaded up fine, saw all three cores, then as soon as I tried to apply Windows updates in hopes of upgrading it to SP3, it says it is no longer a genuine copy of Windows? Any advice on fixing the mess? I would rather get it working then just buy an upgrade copy of Windows 7 rather than buy a full out full version of Windows 7 since I can get the upgrade copy through school for $30.
 


Strange taht it even activated or were you in the thirty day grace period? An Upgrade wouldn't work from what M$ regard as a non-genuine copy of XP.

There's just a possibility you can rescue this over the telephone and for that, you need to force a re-activation process. Go Start>Run and type regedit into the Open box, then press Enter. In the same way as you'd navigate through folders in My Computer, go to H_KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>Software>Microsoft>WindowsNT>Current Version>WPAEvents then in the right hand pane, double click OOBETimer. Edit out a couple of the entries in that next pane - any two will do - then collapse all the hives you opened and leave the Registry from the File>Exit menu. Back in teh Run box, type in %systemroot%\windows\system32\oobe\msoobe.exe /a then hit Enter.

You should then see the Activation wizard form and you need to click on the Telephone option then select your country and the appropriate telephone number will show up. Call them up and explain it's only a new change of hardware and they should be able to regularise it for you.