activation has expired, what happens now?

[jim]

A friend of mine has a pc from best buy, never registered
the home xp online.(its been like 8 months he said) Will
he be able to register it after the 30 days has been up.
Does he have to call it in? And actually what does happen
to your pc when you don't register xp? No drives work he
says. thanks hit me back if ya can help me out.

 

[Willit]

Registration is optional, activation is not. he should be
able to no problem. The drives have nothing to with
activation.

He should find in programs > accessories a option to
activate.
or
He can use this and enter his key.

http://ryan.ript.net/xppid/

 

[Daniel L. Belton]

A friend of mine has a pc from best buy, never registered
the home xp online.(its been like 8 months he said) Will
he be able to register it after the 30 days has been up.
Does he have to call it in? And actually what does happen
to your pc when you don't register xp? No drives work he
says. thanks hit me back if ya can help me out.

Activation and registration are two very different items. Registration
is optional and the system will run fine if not done. Activation must
be done (either by the user, or the OEM) and must be done within the
first 30 days or XP will stop working.

 

[Alex Nichol]

A friend of mine has a pc from best buy, never registered
the home xp online.(its been like 8 months he said) Will
he be able to register it after the 30 days has been up.
Does he have to call it in? And actually what does happen
to your pc when you don't register xp?

If he does a clean install, formatting the drive, after booting the CD,
then he will have 30 days from then in which to get on the internet and
activate it. That relates to the hardware - there is no need to
*register* with personal details, at ll.

If you do not activate, then after 30 days all you will be able to do is
boot to Safe mode, and could activate then, but by phoning in to do it
- a modest hassle, but why wait that long?

 

[raingod]

Not sure I understand the problem. If the Computer was
never cranked up until 8 months later then you should
have the standard 30 days. One thing to note that since
it sounds like he has an OEM machine with a OEM verision
of windows XP on it, if it has SP1 installed then it may
continue running without registering it with MS.
Otherwise normally windows just stops working after 30
days.