Windows XP Home Product Key rejected as invalid

Question

We are a small co with some 25 odd Dells. One of the 4700's purchased last year has a strange problem. When the user tried to download Msft's beta antispyware, he was led to a validation site, and although its optional,  chose to submit the product key off the COA sticker, for validation and it has been repeatedly rejected as invalid - I have tried it out twice after squinting extra carefully to read the letters and digits and had a second person confirm them. Later I checked out other PCs purchased about the same time and had no problems validating them. Although Jellybean finder shows that keys on the PCs themselves are the same - possibly some Dell Corporate key.   I have not as yet received a useful response from Dell Tech support on this issue,  and I am worried that some time later whenever Msft decides to tighten its requirements,  we will have a problem with automatic updates and many patches that we will need for this PC. Have any of you ever faced a similar problem.

fireberd · Answer

Are you reading the digits correctly?  e.g. a number '1' and the letter 'l' and the number '0' and the Letter 'O' have known to be misread and cause rejections.

RealNovice · Answer

That was it - went back and squinted some more - was reading a B as an 8

fireberd · Answer

:smileyvery-happy:

rickmktg · Answer

:smileyvery-happy:

Hydralisk00222 · Answer

@aps@sun wrote:
This seems to happen quite a bit where the key is misread. I wish that these stickers would be printed in a larger print so that I would not have to use a magnifying glass to interpret the keys.

but it would make them easier to be stolen.

Annie70 · Answer

This seems to happen quite a bit where the key is misread. I wish that these stickers would be printed in a larger print so that  I would not have to use a magnifying glass to interpret the keys.

rickmktg · Answer

@aps@sun wrote:
This seems to happen quite a bit where the key is misread. I wish that these stickers would be printed in a larger print so that I would not have to use a magnifying glass to interpret the keys.

What's amazing is that MS uses B, 8s, zeros, Ohs. I'm a direct marketer. We print codes on catalogs and NEVER use ANY of the possible confusion numbers/letters UNLESS we know it's impossible (i.e. customer says B, but we know it's all numeric).

shesagordie · Answer

And I thought it was a sign of my age, having to use a magnifying glass to read those stupid labels.

These following characters are often confused due to similar appearance 1 & l O, 0 & D B & 8 S & 5 2 & Z 6 & G U, V & W

Bev.

RealNovice · Answer

Update

Microsoft has another website http://www.microsoft.com/resources/howtotell/ww/default.mspx, which runs a validation assistant (I guess an active X script) to determine if the product key is valid.

The question then is why should we have to painfully type in a key off COA at one site when there is already a mechanism available to check this automatically. This mindset reminds me of certain .gov sites and forms. Dell Tech support needs to come up to speed on this - they attributed the problem to (1) Jellybean key finder somehow changing or corrupting the product key or (2) installation of SP2 doing the same thing.

Windows General

Windows XP Home Product Key rejected as invalid

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