interesting vista validation thingy

[Perris Calderon]

so this is now the third motherboard on this computer, (all under warantee)

in the past I had to contact ms by phone to manually asign a new key and then enter it...typically I was given a few days of using vista before the os crippled the box

anyway, this time I thought I would try something new, I would go to the validation center and see if the site would validate the os before the box became crippled and without having to get a new key asigned

guess what?

joy

now I don't know if this will do the trick and will wait a week or two to report back but I can't imagine the ms site would validate the box and then the os would cripple it so I believe this did the trick

that's a trick for you guys who are always changing hardware, before the box registers the new hardware and questions validation, try going to get ms to validate before the issue arises

 

[Sazar]

I've never had to validate by phone on either XP or Vista

I always just do the web validation if it prompts and I am done.

 

[Howling Wolf]

Maybe not related, but 2 weeks ago, a dialog box appeared asking me to vadidate my copy of Vista Ultimate again, which I did perform in a matter of seconds. The weird thing, for me at the least, is that there was no hardware replacement since the 1st time I validated Vista, maybe 1 year and a half ago...

 

[JPRuss]

Very few times, have I ever had to actually validate by phone, activiation over the internet almost always works, even when I change several pieces of hardware, I've even moved hard drives with vista from one machine to another machine and still no problems.

The only time I really ever had a problem was once I installed the wrong OEM Windows (I think it was HP OEM on a Dell PC, and although it accepted the key to install, it would not validate later.

Even when you validate by phone, I think it just goes to some call center, and they only asked me "Is this a legal copy of XP?", to which I responded yes, and then they gave me a key to enter and viola. So it didn't seem to be they sceen these things very carefully anyway.

 

[Perris Calderon]

well, the web validation didn't work, I'm still getting the warning, will have to do it by phone after all