Hi, thanks for providing this fascinating forum. I have read through many posts before posting myself, but couldn’t find quite what I wanted, so I hope you’ll forgive me if it’s already been answered somewhere. Problem is this: I bought an HP laptop a few years ago, with W7 64 bit. A couple of weeks ago, the hard disk failed catastrophically. You don't get recovery media with these machines, but I know how to rebuild computers etc, and had backed MOST (sigh) of my stuff up, so got hold of a W7/64 DVD and started to reinstall the O/S. Then I discovered that the licence sticker had been almost completely worn away – I can read about half of it. Needless to say, neither HP nor Microsoft wanted to know about this, so I’m stuck. I downloaded something called the Microsoft Toolkit, ran it on my ancient desktop PC, and woo-hoo, it gave me a key – ran it on the laptop and it activated, as confirmed by the system Info screen. I thought everything was fine. However, a few days later, I've started getting the black desktop and “not genuine” warning. Over the last couple of days, I've tried every suggested fix I can find on any forum or Youtube video (deleting updates, stopping services etc), culminating in running the WAT Fix and W7 loader, as suggested here, plus all the suggested fixes etc for the latter – no joy. Is there anything at all I can do, or will I have to wipe it again and just install a W7/32 that I have in a genuine slip with a key? Thanks
OK, thanks for that – sorry, never heard of either of those things so I’ve Googled them. I’ve just run the MGADIAG tool: Sorry, not sure how to include pics - if you click on them you can read them OK I think. Oh, and for some reason, I forgot to mention that it's W7/64 Professional. I'll get it right eventually... I tried the steps in that other thread you posted, but it won't validate (MS web page freezes up)
Sorry guys, ran it again (about the 9th time while I was waiting to see if anybody replied!) and it seems to have worked! Thanks you so much