Activating a copy of xp which is in use

Hi,

You must hear this question all the time but I've read through the stickies and did a search and didn't find anything to easily answer the question.

Basically a friend of mine has got a problem with his PC, so he gave it to me to fix and I've sorted most of it out, but in installing the updates it's now saying its not genuine.
I have a genuine copy of XP somewhere in my pile of disks, but don't really want to do a fresh install as I might as well put on Win7 or something.

Is their a way to activate this easily? Everything I read on here seemed to be about creating your own setup disks or something.

Thanks for your time...

 

Hi,

I downloaded the OEMBIOS Changer tool but need a little more guidance on what I am to do.

"check existence of oem string" - I could not see an option to do this.

I ran the OEMBIOS changer file, and used option 1 to check for SLP string and CRC of needed OEMBIOS files.

Code:

Windows XP OEMBIOS Test v1.1/269/106 (C) 2007-2010 severach @ msfn forums
F:Dell System OEMBIOS.CAT CRC=63875D1F
F:Dell System OEMBIOS.CAT CRC=B6F0EEFD
These Royalty OEM install CD's should preactivate (SLP) on your system.
Lines starting with E: are not reliably detected when running under Windows
Press Enter!

I matched the second CRC entry on that list to a dell entry in "The Windows XP OEMBIOS Archive" thread.
I downloaded the "uncompressed" version of the files, and extracted them into the "Uncompressed Oembios Folder".
Should I go and run the tool with these files?

Not too sure if I'm on the right path, or am doing this wrong. Also not sure about the DMI tool you mentioned.
In the "Activation check and Serial tools" folder there was an application called CrystalDMI, on running it just seems to give lots of info on things. The 11th entry on the drop down was "OEM Strings" which just had some info about Dell...

Code:

------------------------------------------------------------------
 11 OEM Strings
------------------------------------------------------------------
Type                           : 0Bh (11)
Length                         : 05h (5)
Handle                         : 0B00h
Count                          : 01h (1)
OEM String  1                  : www(dot)dell(dot)com

Thanks again for your time, it's most appreciated.

 

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Got it all worked out. Many thanks for your help, and appologies for my noobiness.