The Unknown P said:
Some OEM's if shipped directly to you from the manufacturer and not
purchased through a retail outlet may not be activated. It is a simple
procedure to do either over the internet or phone. Once this is done I
highly recommend going into windows\system32 and locating the wpa.dbl file
and copying this to a floppy disk. This is your product activation file,
don't bother trying to read it it's heavily encoded, and if you ever have to
reinstall the OS you simply do so without having to activate and then
replace the file in the windows\system32 folder with the one you copied to
your floppy disk and voila instant activation anywhere anytime. This only
works on the same machine that the original wpa.dbl file came from. This is
not a way of getting around the activation. The encoded file contains
information about your OS and the various pieces of your sytem like the
Mother Board. Good luck.
That will only work if you do a repair install, not a format.