Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general (More info?)
Have 5 WinXP systems and licenses (all valid) here in the office and just
learned that my CAD workstation has an illegal copy of WinXP Pro (Corporate)
installed. Since I didn't purchase a corporate license, I found that rather
odd.... But we did find out what happened.
Last year, the CAD station went belly-up and the motherboard and a hard
drive were toast. Luckily, it happened on a Friday afternoon and I was able
to drop it off at my friends computer store so it could be fixed over the
weekend. Picked it up the following Monday and "all was fixed" says my
friend "I even loaded you a fresh copy of Windows with SP2 to save you some
time....". Thanks buddy and sure enough, within a couple hours of loading
all my CAD software, Adobe products and restoring the ton's of files from
backups - we were up and running. I even did some Windows update on the
system at that time and it has worked well since...
The CAD station is seldom ever used for surfing, there is no email account
setup on that system and I honestly don't recall doing many updates since
last year. But after hearing about the new validation process and seeing it
being done on the other workstations, I decided to update the CAD station as
well. Nope, no good and MS now thinks I'm a stinking, no good software
pirate......
Well, my friend did me a favor and for over a year we were unknowingly using
an illegal copy. Unfortunately, my friend has since passed away (Lupus) so
I can't ask him for advice and so I'm turning to the guru's here for the
"How-to- do it". I have a legit license and Product Key for the workstation
but how do I go about getting the "real" product key into this version?
More importantly - can it be done or must I reload everything from scratch?
I've been reading about doing an in-place upgrade and you then enter the
product key but I'll be updating a Corporate version, which is the
illegitimate child and using a WinXP Pro retail version - can you even do
that?
Appreciate your help and hopefully I can do this without having to do a
total reinstall of everything.
Thanks,
bob
Have 5 WinXP systems and licenses (all valid) here in the office and just
learned that my CAD workstation has an illegal copy of WinXP Pro (Corporate)
installed. Since I didn't purchase a corporate license, I found that rather
odd.... But we did find out what happened.
Last year, the CAD station went belly-up and the motherboard and a hard
drive were toast. Luckily, it happened on a Friday afternoon and I was able
to drop it off at my friends computer store so it could be fixed over the
weekend. Picked it up the following Monday and "all was fixed" says my
friend "I even loaded you a fresh copy of Windows with SP2 to save you some
time....". Thanks buddy and sure enough, within a couple hours of loading
all my CAD software, Adobe products and restoring the ton's of files from
backups - we were up and running. I even did some Windows update on the
system at that time and it has worked well since...
The CAD station is seldom ever used for surfing, there is no email account
setup on that system and I honestly don't recall doing many updates since
last year. But after hearing about the new validation process and seeing it
being done on the other workstations, I decided to update the CAD station as
well. Nope, no good and MS now thinks I'm a stinking, no good software
pirate......
Well, my friend did me a favor and for over a year we were unknowingly using
an illegal copy. Unfortunately, my friend has since passed away (Lupus) so
I can't ask him for advice and so I'm turning to the guru's here for the
"How-to- do it". I have a legit license and Product Key for the workstation
but how do I go about getting the "real" product key into this version?
More importantly - can it be done or must I reload everything from scratch?
I've been reading about doing an in-place upgrade and you then enter the
product key but I'll be updating a Corporate version, which is the
illegitimate child and using a WinXP Pro retail version - can you even do
that?
Appreciate your help and hopefully I can do this without having to do a
total reinstall of everything.
Thanks,
bob