Hello all, my first post. I've recently been asked to fix two Dell Inspiron 6000s owned by friends. They both paid £400 for them from the same seller, who claimed the laptops were new. But they're really 2 years old, and are installed with Vista and 1 year subscriptions to Norton Antivirus and Giant Antispyware. Is this a common scam?
It doesn't matter wether it's common or not...it's scam. You should take some juristical steps if felt necessary.
I agree. But the seller is a colleague of the owners and they won't give me his name in case I turn him in. I have never encountered the sale of pirate software before and I'm very curious to know whether this is unusual.
Scam of course is usual, relatively spoken. Many people are scammed. There are ways to protect oneselves against, yes, but it sometimes just happens. In my opinion it would suck dick if there are pirate retailers using our bios method. Making money with it isn't and never was our intention.
I don't know about any BIOS modifications. What makes you think this might be a factor? Can you point me towards a relevant thread? I have fixed one of the laptops by buying some genuine recovery discs and installing XP. (The laptop was originally pre-installed with XP by Dell.) The second laptop still has all the pirate stuff on it. I am hoping to borrow it for a day so I can install XP. But maybe I can get some useful info about the hacked/pirated software before I reformat it, if anyone's interested. For example, I would like to know whether the seller has found a way to stop the timer which forces Vista registration after a certain number of days. As far as I know the laptop was bought in July. Last week the timer said that Vista had to be registered within 30 days. So it seems to me that somebody may have cracked the usual 120 day trial period. If that's the case, perhaps I should tell Microsoft.
What kind of pirate stuff is on it? The usual activation period is 30 days not 120 and could be extended twice by using the rearm command. What kind of licensing model is used? SLP? Is Vista activated already? There is a timerstopper crack available long time ago. But I thought it's already disabled by Microsoft update. Just search for timerstop.sys file on it. What about the DVD? Looks it like the original one? And what about the key used? Yen
From what you are telling us, it's not obvious in what way those laptops were manipulated. There are plenty methods to do that stuff, yes, but heck knows which one they used."