My past experience, especially regarding Dell and XP is that the Key you find in the installed OS comes from the factory media it was installed from, (and perhaps delivered with the machine) and will not require activation at all if installed on a blank hard drive in the appropriate Dell machine. The sticker on the bottom has a number that would work using other media, possibly retail.
It seemed that if the hard drive was not blank, then the Dell install media would stop and ask for a key like you would expect, and the one on the bottom would work. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Geary Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2011 7:39 PM To: Scott Matthews Cc: thinkpad list Subject: Re: [Thinkpad] ProduKey Hmm... I just checked my system, and the Office 2010 key matches, but the Windows 7 key does not. And I see this note under Known Problems on the ProduKey site: * If you bought your computer with installed operating system, you may find the Windows product key appeared in ProduKey utility is different from the product key on your Windows CD. This problem is mostly reported with Dell computers. So I'm not sure what to suggest, sorry! -Mike On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 4:36 PM, Scott Matthews <[email protected]> wrote: > Should the ProduKey results be the same as what I would see printed? > Or is the ProduKey result possibly some variation on the key? > > From what I can see of what remains on my sticker, it's not the same > as what ProduKey says. And ProduKey also gives me the key for Office, > which I checked against a record I have of that, and that seems > different too. > > Is it expected that the keys extracted by ProduKey should look very > different from the keys that would be printed on the sticker/CD case? > > > > On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Michael Geary <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Scott Matthews > > <[email protected]> > > wrote: > >> > >> Sorry, one other question: now that I'm looking, I can see that the > >> windows key is totally worn off the bottom of my laptop -- is there > >> a simple way to get that key back? > > > > There sure is - run ProduKey to display all your keys or save them > > to a > > file: > > http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html > > I've used ProduKey many times - great program. > >> > >> I gather I can perform a clean install with the Win7 upgrade, but I > >> assume I'll have to enter that key? > > > > It will certainly do the clean install - don't know about the > > activation problem that Chris mentioned, but at least you'll have > > all your old > product > > keys if you do need them. > > -Mike > > _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
