XP Pro Upgrade Gets Invalid Product Key

[DukieDallas]

I'm trying to upgrade an attorney's Sony Vaio laptop from XP Home SP2 to XP
Pro SP2. I have a new retail package XP Pro Upgrade purchased through CDW.

The pre-upgrade compatibility check shows everything's OK. But when I start
the actual upgrade and enter the 25 character product key, it says it's an
invalid product key. We've actually had this happen with two separate
copies of the Pro Upgrade. When it happened with the first one, we had CDW
replace it.

Don't know if it's relevant, but both copies of Pro Upgrade have a funny
looking character in the product key. It looks like it has to be a "J", but
it hangs below the baseline of all the other characters and is sort of
squeezed in between the characters on the left and right.

Somehow I think this has to be caused by Sony's OEM load of XP Home, but I
don't know what that would be. The XP Home user account being used is a
member of the Administrators group.

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[Guest]

I say take the upgrade back to CDW and ask them what the unknown character is.

 

[DukieDallas]

Already did that and got a Sgt Schultz reply - "We know
nothing...NOTHING...."

As I said, we had them take back the first upgrade and send another one.
Same issue two times now.

If CDW weren't a Fortune 500 company, I'd wonder if they were buying their
Microsoft products on the street in China, but...