The COA sticker is useless. It only proves that you bought a machine with XP installed.. Search for threads on making an oem install, and change the strings inside the VB to whichever OEMBIOS you choose to use.. You need to make the oem install//
Thanks Thanks for the tip about the COA being useless. That will save me some time and grief. I have contacted MS and HP and I can see now that I am on my own with my 6 year old computer. Luckily I am very happy with Ubuntu. 8.10 so it is not the end of the world. Right now I am experimenting with taking a snapshot of the XP Home installation using VirtualBox hoping that the 30 day activation period will become frozen in time and will continue to operate into eternity.