Steve F. said:
I have an old Dell computer and when I reinstalled Windows and did a
genuine
windows advantage update it said that my key was no longer valid and
directed
me to a website to buy Windows?
I have contacted Dell and since the computer is out of warranty they
can't
do anything about it. My question is can Microsoft help me?
Steve
I'd be making a big protest (read underlined, 72 point font here!!) to
customer service.
Since it is a Dell machine, chances are that you have an OEM licensed
operating system. With that kind of license it is typically tied to the use
of the particular machine on which it was sold. As such MS wouldn't be
responsible for supporting the OS. Dell would. However, even though Dell is
no longer supporting the machine under warranty they should have info
available as few users that I know of replace their machine every time the
warranty expires.
It may be you have to spend a few hours scouring knowlege bases or pay for a
tech support incident, but under no circumstances should your windows
license expire just because your warranty did!!!
Since the problem seemed to occur after doing a MS upgrade, the MS KB
database may be a good place to start. Companies like Dell make custom
tweaks to the OS in order to make it perform better on their hardware. As
such, problems like this are frequent. Despite it not "being their problem",
MS has been quite good in placing fixes and patches for the more common
occurrences on their website.
It is possible that some upgrade has overwritten something that it shouldn't
have, or isn't making a check that it should be - word it however you want -
it's probably a glitch between the regular MS code and the custom tweaks and
I'd bet you're not the first, or the only one to run into this problem.
- Best of luck.
