I have a laptop with a proper (bought & paid for) license to run Ultimate. Last week when I booted up, it said I had to activate immediately and claimed I did not have a genuine copy.

So I reloaded an old Ghost Image made over a month ago, and this remained activated for several days before that too said I needed to activate and claimed I had "new hardware".

Strange thing is nothing in this laptop has changed. Certainly no new drivers, hardware or anything.

So what the hell are Microsoft playing at? Does anyone else have experience of stuff like this happening? I am loathe to waste another activation and angry with Microsoft for putting me through this sh*t.

NRM Smith

I believe the only people that can help you with this are Microsoft support.

Mark

nrms wrote:

So what the hell are Microsoft playing at? Does anyone else have experience of stuff like this happening? I am loathe to waste another activation and angry with Microsoft for putting me through this sh*t.

I think I've heard of similar, and that it is a "known issue" --- in your shoes, I would personally try and obtain a copy of the Vista SP1-integrated installation media and clean install --- possibly even with the drivers integrated into a personalised installation DVD.

But yes, contacting Microsoft Support is a good idea

Well, I went back and clean installed Vista-SP1 (I have an active Technet subscription), installed all uptodate drivers & MS Windows Updates reactivated & then made an clean image backup. So we'll see whether it happens again.

Thanks
NRM Smith