My cousin was having a lot of problems with his Vista 64 bit Home Premium tower shutting off. I think it was made by HP, and it was one of those small units - less than half the size of a normal tower.
His power supply had gone bad, and since this particular PS was not a normal configuration (it was only about 2 inches wide and ran the length of the tower), and since buying a replacement supply would have cost more than the PC was worth, I decided to put his perfectly fine HDD into another 64 bit Vista Home Premium tower I had from the old days.
After I installed his drive and booted, the system wanted a product key. I used the key on the sticker of the 'new' tower. It didn't like it and prompted me to call the MS phone number which took me through the automated process of entering this 45 character key, followed by me reading back another long set of letters and numbers.
After that, the activation was complete and there was no longer a 30 day countdown, so I gave it back to my cousin. Now, about a month later (strangely enough?), he gets this message that his copy of Windows is not genuine. It displays no number of days to activate - it just displays this message in the lower left corner of the screen when he boots. According to him, it's been doing this for over a week, and it seems to not affect his use of the computer.
He says he never got any warnings that something was amiss, never got a day countdown - it just appeared.
Is this something to be ignored? He's been ignoring it so far without any ill effects. Should I have used the key from his original tower instead of the one on the replacement chassis? And shouldn't the phone call I made to MS with all the character typing and reading, followed by the 'Congratulations. Your product has been successfully activated' message have taken care of any validation already?
His power supply had gone bad, and since this particular PS was not a normal configuration (it was only about 2 inches wide and ran the length of the tower), and since buying a replacement supply would have cost more than the PC was worth, I decided to put his perfectly fine HDD into another 64 bit Vista Home Premium tower I had from the old days.
After I installed his drive and booted, the system wanted a product key. I used the key on the sticker of the 'new' tower. It didn't like it and prompted me to call the MS phone number which took me through the automated process of entering this 45 character key, followed by me reading back another long set of letters and numbers.
After that, the activation was complete and there was no longer a 30 day countdown, so I gave it back to my cousin. Now, about a month later (strangely enough?), he gets this message that his copy of Windows is not genuine. It displays no number of days to activate - it just displays this message in the lower left corner of the screen when he boots. According to him, it's been doing this for over a week, and it seems to not affect his use of the computer.
He says he never got any warnings that something was amiss, never got a day countdown - it just appeared.
Is this something to be ignored? He's been ignoring it so far without any ill effects. Should I have used the key from his original tower instead of the one on the replacement chassis? And shouldn't the phone call I made to MS with all the character typing and reading, followed by the 'Congratulations. Your product has been successfully activated' message have taken care of any validation already?
