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Reinstall Vista on Inspiron E1505 - Is CD Key Required?
I have an E1505 that I bought used with XP Pro on it. I want to install Vista Home from the recovery CDs that came with it (the guy I bought it from had removed Vista and installed XP). Will I have to enter a CD key, which I don't have, when installing from the recovery CDs or when activating Vista or is it somehow built in to the recovery process? Thanks in advance. Cliff S., Atlanta
speedstep
8 Wizard
8 Wizard
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June 26th, 2009 06:00
There are no permanent activations with VISTA from oem's or via Retail.
To install for ALL Versions of Vista the Key is not required. You can say I will put the key in later and it will accept that and install.
HOWEVER to ACTIVATE vista it will requre you to put in the COA key on the machine.
You can use Vista 30 days at a time 4 times.
There's an officially supported way to turn that 30 day
evaluation period into 120 days.You can "re-arm" the
trial period for another 30 days, and do so up to 3 times.
Here's how it works:
Click on the start button and type "Cmd" into the Start Search box.
Press Ctrl-Shift-Enter to open the command prompt.
Type "slmgr -rearm" and hit enter.
Reboot the computer.
Make sure to re-arm the system again 29 or 30 days later.
Obviously this feature was built into Vista by Microsoft, and they have
confirmed that extending the evaluation period
is not a violation of Vista's end user agreement.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925582