Hi, I have come to this forum after contacting both Acer and Microsoft. In the case of Acer I got the short sharp shift and very snooty about it too. Microsoft, the call was free but the help wasn't. And I thought if the people here can't help me then no one can! I recently bought a second hand Acer Aspire 5633 ( Ebay ) sans H/D and with a Power jack fault. The actual comp was in mint condition. Because the H/D was missing the seller threw in an unused Acer Vista upgrade disc set. I stripped the laptop down and repaired the PJ prob and installed a H/D . I then did a trial install ( i.e. no product key entry ) of the Vista disc ( reason: the discs had been kept face to face and the surfaces appeared slightly pitted ) the install was faultless. I then went to activate it online but when I entered the Product key it was refused , Message was, this appears to be an invalid key. I have several genuine Vista discs with Product keys so I just used one of them to validate the install. My question is has anybody seen this type of thing before and if so has an answer for me ? Is it possible this is out of date. cheers, Eddie.
If you used an upgrade key on a clean install, it won't activate unless you edit the registry Search for MediaBootInstall and change the value to 0 Open CMD and type: slmgr -rearm Reboot, and try activating with upgrade key again
Hi, Thank you for that. Am I correct in saying if I had done a normal install and entered the key when requested that the Product number would have been accepted? Either way I will copy your advice for another time. cheers, Eddie. Added.. I searched MediaBootInstall and found the answer to the prob. I could have entered the number but not the Activate online which according to the blurb would have allowed the number to be accepted second time of asking. Again thank you for your invaluable assistance.
As stated it has never been used. I have been in contact with the seller whom I have found to be forthright and honest. He even went as far as trying to find the solution for me.
Wasn't implying anything just listing what the possibilities are after MrMajic's post .. So if your the first user of the upgrade product key the solution is to make the upgrade install think that there is a previous version of Windows installed .. What MrMajic is describing is a way to do that .. So whatever method you use if there is no indication of a previous version of windows it won't activate using the upgrade media and it's product key
No probs, yea the key would be accepted during / after install, but it would not activate until MediaBootInstall was set to 0
To be honest first thing I would do is check to see if you have slic 2.1 in bios if so you could you could have pre -activated and kept your upgrade key.