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August 24th, 2005 17:00
Reinstalling Windows after M/B Replaced
I have a 4-yr old Precision Workstation 340 that the motherboard failed this week. The machine is a year out of warranty, I couldn't find the OEM motherboard for under $450, so I bought an aftermarket board and made the repair. Of course the hard-drive didn't want to boot up after the m/b swap, so I needed to do a reinstall to get the hard drive to boot up again.
Well, if I put in the Dell Precision restore disk that came with the machine (W2Kpro_SP2), I get the flashing message that "This copy of Windows only designed for Dell Systems" or something similar.
I own the license to this software as I purchased it with the machine... now I can't access it to continue using the machine (sans the OEM motherboard and OEM memory). Is there a work around or can Dell do anything to get me around this trap?
If I was stealing the software, that would be one thing, but I have the hard drive with the software on it from the original factory install (which I backed up, thankfully).
-- Kathy
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speedstep
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August 25th, 2005 16:00
The same is true for COMPAQ, HP, GATEWAY, TOSHIBA, IBM, NEC
With product activation Microsoft takes it one step further and
makes it so that you CANNOT INSTALL the OS on the same system with the same
motherboard if its a replacement because the Hardware hash wont match.
You arent going to get any help here and microsoft will insist that
you need to buy a new licence.
A generic OEM Windows CD will install on many different systems
up to but NOT INCLUDING XP. So if you have WIN9X,ME,2000 generic
OEM CD then you can use the software and install that way.
This is however not a discussion or negotiation.
You are asking Dell to Violate its agreement with microsoft.
Thats not going to happen. If you dont like the Fair use Problems
with the sofware then get your congress person to FORCE microsoft to
change its policy.