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Windows Product Activation hates me... (activated again, for the 3rd time)

SunnyD

SunnyD

Belgian Waffler
Obnoxiously this morning, Windows XP farted. My wife came and woke me early saying something about product activation on the computer. Ohhhhkay, this computer was activated months ago and nothing changed, except the changeover from an PCI hardwire NIC to a USB Wireless NIC, and a move out of the bedroom to the livingroom.

It wanted to be activated again.

I know the NIC is one device that produces the hash key for WPA, but the thing is, last night after moving the computer and changing to the USB NIC it booted up right nicely without incident, and without complaining about WPA.

What's up with that?

I gots to give MS a call now to remove 2 of my activations of 3 off of my 5 license package.

SunnyD
 
I gots to give MS a call now to remove 2 of my activations of 3 off of my 5 license package.

5 license package? Licensing and activation are two seperate things. You are only limited on activations by Microsoft, and that depends on the circumstances on why you keep re-activating the same copy(Eg:activating on different machines). If you tell them what happened, I think you will have no trouble re-activating this copy(again).
 

I gots to give MS a call now to remove 2 of my activations of 3 off of my 5 license package.Text

This means that you have licenses of winXP to run on 5 computers. What you need to do is call MS and just tell them that you changed the NIC and that need to reactivate the same WPA number that you used on that computer. There should be no reason to use another of your 5 license package.

Grant
 
Yes yes - I understand the diff between licenses and activations, but 5 licenses technically means 5 activations too. That's really a non-issue tho. My gripe is the fact that nothing has changed for the most part. In fact, when I first added the USB wireless NIC, rebooted a couple times, it never bothered. Then this morning all of a sudden, it wanted to activate. It's just annoying/weird.
 
What is annoying, is that the other two members that responded, didn't pick up on the idea that it shouldn't be necessary to register your new NIC with M$.
 
Originally posted by: Wallysaurus
What is annoying, is that the other two members that responded, didn't pick up on the idea that it shouldn't be necessary to register your new NIC with M$.
Click to expand...

what is annoying, Is others crapping on responses given by other members without giving an actuall helpfull response themselves..

BTW, he is not registering the new NIC with Microsoft, Just re-activating. I understand that it SHOULDN'T have to be done in the first place and I am not going to argue with that fact. It still is not that big of a deal to call and re-activate though.

 
The point is that no one should have to register the fact that they replaced their NIC with anyone. If you want to call it activation, that's fine. The fact of the matter is, that since the only thing that changed was the type and brand of NIC that was in the PC, he had to "register" that fact with Microsoft.

As for the thread crapping. I interpretted his original post as a complaint aimed at XP and not as a request for help.
 
The fact of the matter is, that since the only thing that changed was the type and brand of NIC that was in the PC, he had to "register" that fact with Microsoft.

Agreed...It sucks and shouldn't have to be done..

As for the thread crapping. I interpretted his original post as a complaint aimed at XP and not as a request for help.

And I was just trying to ease his mind that he wasn't going to be losing any of his licenses..
 
This is M$'s ridiculous attempt at trying to suck more money from the consumer, confusing activations and licenses. That's why I'm sticking with 2000 and Debian 😉
 
Okay okay kids... settle down. No need to flame each other in my thread. I appreciate the comments and suggestions, they're all for the most part constructive.

But the real question I was alluding to, which I guess is really my fault for out and out not saying it is WHY Windows felt the need to require activation all of a sudden, while after the USB NIC was install, it never prompted for reactivation for about 3 consecutive reboots (and one was a full power-down of the machine).

The activation request seemed rather arbitrary to me. Kindof like it just decided out of the blue it wanted to be reactivated.
 
The NIC card carries the heaviest weighted value with it, and if there were previous changes, these would have added up enough to count as a changed HASH. I've seen people do the part here, part there thing, then something takes it over the edge. Believe it or not, I've even seen BIOS flashes count as a mobo change.

SunnyD, I've seen a hardware change take a while. From what I figure, it gives you a few reboots to install the drivers and make sure the hardware will work, before it goes and demands Activation.

DC
 
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