I didn't know if my mobo was SLIC 2.1 so I put in the product key on these forums and insterted the a dell certificate using slmgr. Obviously it did work . Am I fine to use one of the Loaders starting to appear immediately or do I need to "flush out" the existing certificate and PID first and if so, how?
You do not need to 'flush' anything unless you used toolkit to use RC activation. The loader in the howto (with sendspace link) thread, worked fine for me. It uses HP Cert and SLIC, so you will need to slmgr -ilc Drive:\folder\certname.xrm-ms, but you can let the Product key alone. Otherwise, you should be fine using a loader. I used Loader on my laptop so I didn't have to wait 87675 years for someone to figure out how to mod it's BIOS since it's a dell.
cheers mate, will try again tonight. having a nightmare trying to get x64 utlimate activated on inspiron 1720 notebook.