T
tstaddon
Hi,
Here's a problem that really has got me stumped at the moment. I've
been through Technet and MSDN, googled to death on this and still
haven't found an answer.
A business contact of mine (small UK business, less than 10 employees)
purchased two HP Compaq workstations last year for the two directors,
with authentic OEM Windows XP Professional preinstalled AND
preactivated AND registered with Microsoft. Neither has had any
hardware changes since purchase.
Aside from printers, financial accounting packages, anti-Spyware and
AntiVirus, nothing whatsoever has been added to the PCs.
The computers were attached to a P2P network so the payroll and tax
return databases can be shared over the LAN. The LAN wasn't connected
to the internet until February, but the internet connection is
firewalled and uses a proxy server. Prior to that both computers used
analogue dialup.
I can point you to a Microsoft webinar stating words to the effect that
activation shouldn't be necessary on a HP system in its original state:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/trans/sysbuild/05_0411_tn_pa.mspx
I suspect these two PCs are about as close to the "original state" that
you're ever going to get after five days' a week business use for a
year...
One of them is forcing a reactivation every time it restarts.
I've tried reactivating by phone, restoring a backup of WPA.DBL,
replacing both the WPA.DBL and WPA.BAK files from backup and even
deleting both files off to be recreated by a fresh activation.
Absolutely no joy - it still attempts to reactivate after every reboot.
I have used three different virus checkers, two non-MS spyware
detection/removal tools, and Windows Update, to check this machine out.
I can't find anything wrong with it.
I am not prepared to spend all hours reinstalling Windows with no
guarantee of a fix unless I have some assurance that this WILL solve
the problem and it WON'T cause loss of data (tricky given that the
recovery option for this workstation is a complete partition overwrite
and the PC in question now has several GB of accounting data on it).
I also have the problem of looking into this issue outside of working
hours (I work for a MS Support partner during the day and this is not
within the scope of my day job), so it does limit the options for
contacting Microsoft Support by phone.
So, any ideas?
Here's a problem that really has got me stumped at the moment. I've
been through Technet and MSDN, googled to death on this and still
haven't found an answer.
A business contact of mine (small UK business, less than 10 employees)
purchased two HP Compaq workstations last year for the two directors,
with authentic OEM Windows XP Professional preinstalled AND
preactivated AND registered with Microsoft. Neither has had any
hardware changes since purchase.
Aside from printers, financial accounting packages, anti-Spyware and
AntiVirus, nothing whatsoever has been added to the PCs.
The computers were attached to a P2P network so the payroll and tax
return databases can be shared over the LAN. The LAN wasn't connected
to the internet until February, but the internet connection is
firewalled and uses a proxy server. Prior to that both computers used
analogue dialup.
I can point you to a Microsoft webinar stating words to the effect that
activation shouldn't be necessary on a HP system in its original state:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/trans/sysbuild/05_0411_tn_pa.mspx
I suspect these two PCs are about as close to the "original state" that
you're ever going to get after five days' a week business use for a
year...
One of them is forcing a reactivation every time it restarts.
I've tried reactivating by phone, restoring a backup of WPA.DBL,
replacing both the WPA.DBL and WPA.BAK files from backup and even
deleting both files off to be recreated by a fresh activation.
Absolutely no joy - it still attempts to reactivate after every reboot.
I have used three different virus checkers, two non-MS spyware
detection/removal tools, and Windows Update, to check this machine out.
I can't find anything wrong with it.
I am not prepared to spend all hours reinstalling Windows with no
guarantee of a fix unless I have some assurance that this WILL solve
the problem and it WON'T cause loss of data (tricky given that the
recovery option for this workstation is a complete partition overwrite
and the PC in question now has several GB of accounting data on it).
I also have the problem of looking into this issue outside of working
hours (I work for a MS Support partner during the day and this is not
within the scope of my day job), so it does limit the options for
contacting Microsoft Support by phone.
So, any ideas?