Last hope

Aedus

Aedus

Aedus

Soldato
Joined
16 Aug 2009
Posts
8,577
Location
Luton, England
My mate brought her laptop to me today saying it's not turning on, after I looked at it it turns out that she didn't activate windows within the 30 days, and therefore she's locked out of it.

I can't activate windows in any way, because phone activation requires you to get to a part of the Computer system properties for the code, but surprise surprise, that's 1 part you're locked out of, a long with control panel and most other things.

I can access the C:\ drive but I can't get on the internet, it wont give me any access.

What are the possibilities apart from buying a new vista CD-key?
 
Well how can I activate it then?

I can't get an activation code from the computer because it wont let me get there, I can't call up and activate because I have no code to activate with, and I can't get on the internet to do an online activation.
 
You can launch a command prompt yes?

If so, then open a command window and type "slmgr -rearm" (without the quotes).

This will give you another 30 days after rebooting.
 
When my activation expires I can still use the PC, I just get harassed to activate all the time. But it's functional.

Are you sure the laptop itself isn't borked in some way?
 
First off, what version of Windows is the laptop running? Secondly, why was she running on trial? Was the laptop just re-formatted or was it self-built?

If the laptop is branded (eg. Dell, HP, Packard Bell) the code you need will be on the COA (Certificate of authenticity) which is located on the bottom of the laptop :).
 
Last edited:
Tute said:
When my activation expires I can still use the PC, I just get harassed to activate all the time. But it's functional.

Are you sure the laptop itself isn't borked in some way?
Click to expand...

Use a Linux Live CD to check, if it boots and works then you've got a functional Operating System. If not then there's a more serious problem at hand.
 
Tute said:
When my activation expires I can still use the PC, I just get harassed to activate all the time. But it's functional.

Are you sure the laptop itself isn't borked in some way?
Click to expand...

They will eventually lock the user out and demand activation (XP certainly does) before allowing anyone to log in, I've had the same issue before and have had to boot into safemode with commandnprompt to rearm activation, sysprepping works too.
 
I'm on the laptop right now, there's no task bar, there's no cmd propt, I can't do much at all, the only reason I can get into the C drive is because I can access it via internet explorer. I loaded up safe mode with cmd propt and it booted me back out saying I have to activate windows and to log back in to normal mode.

Unless there is a way I can launch cmd propt via internet explorer by typing in the short cut
 
Meatball said:
First off, what version of Windows is the laptop running? Secondly, why was she running on trial? Was the laptop just re-formatted or was it self-built?

If the laptop is branded (eg. Dell, HP, Packard Bell) the code you need will be on the COA (Certificate of authenticity) which is located on the bottom of the laptop :).
Click to expand...

Vista home premium, and she left it off for a month and it decided it wanted activation in that time, it expired. She booted it back up and here we are.

It's a Dell, yes I've tried the CD-key on the bottom, but it's not valid apparently, because I can't activate it.

Microsoft told me how to activate it, but shocker, they took away the task bar so I can't physically do it
 
Why wasn't the key already entered? Sounds like somebody has clean installed it with the wrong version of Vista as it needs to the version that corresponds with the key on the laptop which is probably Home Premium OEM and if somebody has installed Vista without a key and selected the incorrect version it's just not going to activate regardless of what you do.
 
Got to command prompt and typed in slmgr -rearm, but all it does is come up with some weird error.

I can also access regedit here too now, so if there's a registry I can change to give me 30 days to activate it, I can probably do that
Bloody laptop!
 
Dano said:
Why wasn't the key already entered? Sounds like somebody has clean installed it with the wrong version of Vista as it needs to the version that corresponds with the key on the laptop which is probably Home Premium OEM and if somebody has installed Vista without a key and selected the incorrect version it's just not going to activate regardless of what you do.
Click to expand...

It was, I had it on my vista after a clean install once too, after about a year it popped up saying I needed to activate it, completely out of the blue.
 
Sounds to me like more is afoot than just a failed activation and an expired grace period.

That sounds properly broken. I'd just format it tbh.
 
Aedus said:
Vista home premium, and she left it off for a month and it decided it wanted activation in that time, it expired. She booted it back up and here we are.

It's a Dell, yes I've tried the CD-key on the bottom, but it's not valid apparently, because I can't activate it.

Microsoft told me how to activate it, but shocker, they took away the task bar so I can't physically do it
Click to expand...

Well, if you're really desperate there's normally a restore partition on all of the newer Dell's which is basically just an image of the hard-drive fresh from the factory.

Maybe you could try restoring from that if it's there? (I think it could be the F11 key on startup but you should see a message for it at POST)
 
Yeah but she wants all her pictures etc, so formatting isn't so much of an option at the moment.

Running CMD as admin still comes up with the same error:

C:\\Windows\system32\slmgr.vbs
Line: 1648
Char: 9
Error: 0xC004E017
 
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