I purchased a used dell laptop computer from a bankrupt manufacturing company. The auctioneer did not wipe the harddrive before liquidation, and the computer still had it's original slp installation of windows xp along with an oem version of office 2007 small business edition. The office suite on this machine appears to have been installed by the oem since dell's service tag website references "UN494 Kit, Software, OFCSBE-2K7 English" I extracted the installation keys for the software using magic jellybean keyfinder and then upgraded to windows 7. If i can find the proper installation media for office 2007 sbe, how many activations am i allowed with this oem key?
i think it's been a few years since the office suite was last activated because the computer was manufactured back in mid-2007. how long does microsoft hold the activation data on their servers before they purge it?
As far as I know retail and OEM keys activation method are same. 10 activations is allowed for both retail and oem editions of any products.
with microsoft's activation procedures, the network interface card (NIC) hardware address is extremely important. if you replace a motherboard in a computer with the same model motherboard and figure out how to hack back in the original nic mac address, you should be able to avoid reactivation.