Robert in CA wrote:
The 8500 hung up again, twice! I was copying a file
and also trying to delete a file and both times the 8500
hung up again on me. These are things I do all the time
and I believe it's acting finicky because I lost my activation
code.

I had to power off both times and the last time I just shut
it down, then restarted it after about 20 minutes or so.

When I call Microsoft I give them my product key of course
so they can activate it or walk me through the steps to activate
is that correct?

Once they activate it can I use the #4 hd as is and create a
clone? Also #3 should then connect if it finished cloning
correctly despite the 'Invalid Windows OS' message.

Is there anything else I should do?

Robert


To attempt a local activation, without Microsoft assistance,
you could try

Administrator Command Prompt
slui

Now, if that fails for some reason, then you would do this:

Administrator Command Prompt
slui 4

This does two things.

It passes information to Microsoft, while that interface is on the screen.

The screen will present a support phone number. You can
send information to Microsoft using touch tone keypad input.

Normally, "slui 4" would be a challenge response sequence,
You type 56 digit number into touch tone phone pad,
after connected to the support phone number, the
support phone number returns a 56 digit response.
But somewhere along that sequence, you can get a human
on the line. I don't think they have a way of
associating your phone call, with the 56 digit
step on the screen, so they may need to ask other
questions.

slui 4 should at least give you a phone number to work with.
That's if you don't trust the support phone number you
have in hand.

*******

I don't, for one moment, assume a correlation between
machine behavior and activation state. The machine should
still work properly, until it decides to stop offering
service (reboots on its own, being an example, or
freezing right after boot). Activation issues must
be sorted:

1) Immediately. Thus, the freezing (and of course it's too
late to do anything then).
2) Can be a 72 hour warning.
3) Can be a 30 day warning.

*******

If it was my machine, I would be working on two parallel paths.

1) Hardware test to determine defective component.
For example, RAM test. Windows has a memory tester.

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...d1717f0c3ffb72

mdsched # schedule memory test on next reboot
# likely needs administrator account

2) Work on activation issue. If machine is not healthy, this
may not be a permanent solution. (While bad RAM could
contribute to a Not Genuine, the odds of that happening are
quite quite small. For example, the bad RAM I had, was close
to some disk driver area, and i would have some disk issues
because of where the RAM was bad - my Macrium backups would
not pass Verify if I took the backups to the other machine and
tested them with Verify in Macrium).

If you were to ask "how common are memory failures?", the
machine I'm typing on, is on its third set of DIMMs.

The second set, from Kingston, never seemed to be right
from day one, as they ran "hotter" than I was comfortable
with. This is DDR2 memory, there is no lower power option,
only one type of chips are used. I was not able to
fault isolate to a single DIMM either, on that one, so
I had to replace the entire set. And no, the BIOS memory
voltage setting was not at an abnormal value either. None
of the RAM I own for this, is suited to high VDimm values,
so I don't do that.

I've had a set of four Samsung, no problems.
The Hynix-chip based modules I own at present,
are flawless. Never seen any behavior to cause
concern. If I buy "cheap" memory, like I bought
eight sticks of one product, five of them failed
(fault isolated to nearest module each time). That
instance appears to be electrochemical in nature,
as I can cause the modules to fail on demand.

If the memory is bad, don't panic, these things happen.

I wish everything had good/excellent diagnostics, but
computers have never been exceptionally good at that.
My favorite diagnostic environment, is on the Sun Sparc,
where you flip the diagnostic switch, and they have
test code for everything on a screen. It will even
test the keyboard for you (as the keyboard has a
locale setting via dip switch underneath). No PC or Mac
diagnostic software (the $69.95 kind) has ever found
a damn thing here.

We have to be content, with starting with the memory test,
and working from there.

Testing computers is a continuous process. Maybe once a year,
you should run a memory test, just to catch bad behavior
before it's an issue. I wouldn't have to say this, if all
the memory I ever bought, was still working... :-/

Freezing computer:

1) Bad RAM.
2) Bad CPU (not very common - occasionally a bad lot of CPUs
leave the factory, but they generally misbehave enough, to
be removed via product returns by customers). Back at work,
we did an informal poll amongst engineers, as a response to
our Reliability PhD, and no engineer could remember any
"bad CPU" events on the product lines they'd worked on. There
are a few Windows "MCE" error codes, related to things caught
by the CPU internally. Machine Check Errors caused by ECC problems
on internal CPU busses. You'd have specific Blue Screen events
on the computer, if that were the case.

Some freezing problems, they only happen in power-save states.
You sit quietly for five minutes, the machine freezes, but only
if it's quiet. If you're moving the mouse, maybe it doesn't freeze.
This is a sign of instability at low VID:FID. On enthusiast
computers, you can turn up VCore a bit.

3) Insane disk drive. If the power connector is loose and the
+12V only manages +11V inside the drive, it can make the
drive go into a spin up/spin down loop, and the drive can
lose contact with the rest of the machine ("insanity"). That's
an example of where a storage problem, is the fault of the
drive, but is not a platter problem. More of a controller problem.

Testing the RAM, is easy to do. The rest is harder to test.

memtest
Prime95
Seatools

My machine has exhibited *plenty* of symptoms, and it has yet
to be a motherboard problem.

I have one machine here, in storage, where it looks like I
finally have a motherboard problem. It's possible the ICH5
is bad on it. I could not get the machine to run, the last time
I tried. But the computer case won't be wasted, as there
is a homeless motherboard waiting for a case to house it.

Paul