On 6/29/2014 12:43 PM, Paul wrote:
Al Drake wrote:
On 6/29/2014 9:41 AM, Mayayana wrote:
| I since was successful in contacting support for chat. I had to
| provide my phone number which is something I don't like to do. I
agreed
| to allow agent to have control of the system and he was successful in
| activation. I would have preferred another alternative like having it
| work from the start but...........
|
| Thanks for you reply.
|

And thanks for getting back with the details. That's
a bit worrisome. It sounds like MS may be trying to
make things difficult.

| Also, are you telling me that I can only use identical board with
| retail that I built from scratch? I can't transfer to another computer
| if this one dies completely?

I should have been more clear. OEM refers to premade
computers, but it also refers to the license. If you go
to someplace like buycheapsoftware.com you'll find that
there are different options. It's confusing because MS
tends to say "Full" and "OEM", while advertisers will say
things like "full oem". Fiull OEM is OEM.

The full version license allows for serial install on any
number of machines, as long as it's one at a time. The
OEM license is a creative invention on Microsoft's part.
They claim it's licensed to the motherboard. OEM version
usually costs about $100 less than full. There have been
fights over whether OEM is legal for do-it-yourselfers to
use. I don't remember where it stands at this point, but
you can buy OEM and the dealers ship a small piece of
hardware with the disk, to satisfy the license.

Some people say one can talk them into activating
OEM on a new box. Maybe so. I don't know. But it's
not licensed for that. So if you buy an OEM version
and try to install it to another computer with different
hardware it will likely fail to activate. It's a gamble. You
can save $100 and take a chance, or pay a lot more
and risk that you'll never need to reinstall.


That was my understanding about OEM and why I decided to purchase
retail. I have never been know to be successful at saving $100. I
rather be free to do what I like at almost any cost.
I do have a laptop that must have OEM installed. I'm not into
building them yet. I enjoy the freedom of putting a desktop inside an
aquarium if I like. I could and have spend a lot of time looking at
all the ways some have them installed.


http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cu_sc_prodact_master

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/w...#1TC=windows-7

"f activation isn't successful, stay on the line to be transferred to
a customer service representative who can assist you."

That's not going to happen in your case, because activation claims
to be successful.

When I installed Windows 7 from scratch in a VM, I tried this to get
to the phone activation menu.

slui 4

That article also points to a forum.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...install?auth=1


They use MGADiag to try to figure out what happened.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...9-c858e8476dce


You will notice that the log from MGADiag, blots out two sets of characters
in the license key. I wouldn't feel comfortable posting that in the open,
but that's just me.

There's an MGADiag here. Download is immediate. And no, I don't know how
to read these, what values are "good" or what values are "Bad". I just
happened to run into that forum doing other searches, and reading that
log seems to be like reading tea leaves. Some of the participants
seem to know exactly what is wrong.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=52012

*******

And here, they use msoobe (OutOfBoxExperience) to reset activation.
It gives an opportunity to enter the key again, like a key change.
I have no idea when to use this, what the side effects are.
Just mentioning it as another in a long line of programs.
You can do a key change with "slui 3", but I don't know
if msoobe was for older OSes, and slui is for newer OSes,
or what the story is.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5329129_chan...t-key-oem.html

If I was running "slui 3" or "slui 4", I would first start
a command prompt with "cmd.exe", right-click and select
"Run as Administrator", to ensure that any license related
activities have Administrator privilege.

*******

Support from Microsoft, for activation issues, is supposed
to be free. Because it's their burden on you, you paid
for the product, and activation is supposed to work.
Support for other things comes with terms, such as limited
time support for Service Pack updates (maybe a year after
a Service Pack comes out, and you're having trouble getting
it to take). So somewhere in that massive phone network of
theirs, they are supposed to support activation (with real
people).

Paul
Thanks Paul. I'll add this post to my collection of keepers. I don't
think MS support knew why this was a failure and I also think they don't
have a data base of keys attached to product ID numbers. They don't have
any way of knowing if one machine no longer exists when the activation
is granted again. That's just my take. I asked the guy if he could tell
me which key went with which machine so I could keep a record of my own
so I wouldn't get confused and he replied they had no way to tell.