Hi guys I often have Laptops come in for repair and sometimes they might need a new hard drive or I have bought spares repairs without hard drives and need to re install from the COA! All well and good when I can actually read the full key! I am not talking about bypassing or anything illegal here but all i would like to know is the best and easiest LEGAL solution to installing the original OS that the laptop/desktop came with. Any help as always is hugley appreciated Regards CHP
All Laptops and PC's we delivers to Customers, are include an extra, by us created ID Card which contains all relevant infos about the installed and licensed software. That also includes the License and Product Keys as well as MS's COA's! And for sure, even if our customer lose that ID Card, we still have the information in our internal Database. Overall, it's just a question of proper organization! Now, that for sure differs for 3.party machines, one-time customers etc. etc. for which the infos are not available. A good start would be to follow the advice of Tito. Maybe not always legal but accepted in most or near all cases if someone really take the time to deep check! Anyway, for those Service Technican's it would be essential to use a similar way as we did to keep all relevant infos for machines they servicing!
I think the proper way is telling the customer, that their key is unreadable, and offering them the choices they have.
Tito is 100% correct. Even though there is a coa, the system would have shipped with OA key & Cert installed. There is no issue with this as it's legit already. You *MUST* use the same edition though. ie, Win7 Pro (32 or 64bit). You can't upgrade to a higher edition.
Ok so let's see if I understand this correctly. The certificate is installed into the bios? As long as we can read this bios we can then check it to an oem key and this will then activate? It's there an app or a guide to read the certificate from the bios? Thanks so much for the help so far, an unreadable key surely shouldn't mean a customer has to spend even more money buying a key when the computer already has a key? I am not in the habit of asking my customer to spend money they don't have to unlike some technicians. If there is no app or guide to reading the certificate is there a guide anywhere to using this oem/certificate list Thanks again CHP