Background! Well I found myself at this site after a situation I was hoping someone could explain to me. My friend and I both built our machines a while ago with identical components but are having different results. We each have an Asus P5B board. I decided that I needed to do a fresh install and at the same time go 64 bit. My friend gave me a copy of his OEM disk that just required installing with no serial and no password on the user account. When installed on his machine the OS is activated but when installed on mine I have the 30 day period. The only differences that I know of between the two setups is that he updated his bios (official) MORE recently than I did and I used to have the original paradox emulated bios crack running but surely that must have nothing to do with it because I formatted my drive? So after a fair bit of reading I'm thinking of flashing a slic modded bios but wanted some reassurance I am going down the right track? 1. Obtain and flash the correct bios. 2. After a clean install, Place my ASUS.xrm-ms on the root (can this be from the old paradox crack?) 3 Execute the two slmgr commands with the corresponding key for my windows version I hope I have got the general idea or am I wrong? And I'd love to know why our machines are showing different results, any ideas people? thanks in advance
Those steps will fix it. If you've already installed vista 64-bit you probably don't need to reinstall it again. Just update your bios, install the certificate (the Asus.xrm-ms that you have is fine as long as the bios you use contains Asus slic), and change product key to the new one. I don't know why your friend's activated with unmodified bios. Maybe he used vista activator or similar at some point to load slic into memory from mbr and it is still there.