Hi
I have had to recently install Vista because my mother board had fried itself, the advice I received from this site was brilliant, but can you great guys help me again?
I bought my PC orginally with windows vista preinstalled. The PC came with system recovery disks (vista OS was on them) and product key stuck on the back of the case. So far go good.
I had to do a repair of vista because of the motherboard change, but not once during this did it ask me for the product key. Thinking it would be like XP (which I already have up and running on the same PC) I would get nag requesters, I guessed I would enter the key later. Now due to me mainly using XP I forgot to look into activating vista. Now when I finally got around to it I accessed the activation screen, entered the product key and got a report back saying it was not valid. What is happening here. Is this due to vista being an oem copy and because I have changed my mother board, activation thinks I am trying to install vista on another PC? Perhaps I need to reinstall it again. Does anyone have any ideas on this one?

Thanks
Gerryh

Hi Again
Just read jephree's thread on this. What do microsoft think they are playing at! Later on I was going to upgrade my Dual core cpu to a quad core, guess I better wait till then before phoning Microsoft about upgrading my PC. This is just plain nuts!

Gerryh

Most motherboard changes will require a human phone call.

They basically remove your old board association and replace it with the new.

A CPU replacement in itself might not spark another activation even if it were possible.

I have not heard that any policy changed from the Vista "once only" rule but I have seen possible indications that Microsoft backed off it.

Anyway the best is to give them a call.