Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Bulsajo]

So other day I did "triage" on our equipment room, sorting out what crap to keep and what to throw. Most of it I decided to toss. It was a virtually a museum of parts- a dot matrix printer with for tractor feed paper, external zip drives, scsi cards, external CD rom readers at a whopping 3x read speed (they required scsi connection and to insert a CD first you had to insert it into a case thingy and then insert the case), 14 K modems with BJC connectors, HP3 laser printers, serial connection mice brand-new in the box and with their very own Win 3.1 drivers on 5.25" floppydisk, tape back up drives, etc.

Among all this junk I found a few cool things nobody even knew we had: a hardly used IBM p4 A31 laptop, a beautiful digital projector brand-new and in it's own hardshell waterproof/crushproof pelican case, and a copy of Win XP pro OEM for HP Compaq.

Now I know this never got used (and never will get used) because we buy batches of corporate licences for O/S so I have liberated it, which brings me to my question:

On the disk it says XP pro OEM for HP/Compaq only- my question is: has anyone installed this on a non-HP/Compaq machine? Does MS have code on it that will prevent from properly loading on to another machine, or will the registration process fail because it recognizes it's not on a Compaq machine?

[mindmetoo]

I had an XP home code for an HP laptop that I passed on to a friend. I'm pretty sure she doesn't own an HP laptop. But the reg code worked for her. That was a couple years ago, mind you. Maybe MS has gotten smarter.

[Wrench]

Nah ms didn't get smarter.. YOu can stil install the OEM XP on the laptop if you have the key. When you activate you might have to do the phone thingy, sincce its a laptop it might just activate since XP copies for laptops are allowed to activate twice.

[Bulsajo]

Great news, thanks to you both. I'm pretty certain it hasn't even been activated once (seal hasn't been broken on the disks).

[plattwaz]

My HP Compaq laptop came with this CD, to be used for Windows re-install purposes only -- it has a registration key that matches the serial number on the laptop, and apparently it will only work specific to my laptop....not to any HP but mine only.

Or, so they tell me -- it's a new machine, just bought it over Christmas, so I am assuming that MS has only recently started this.

[mindmetoo]

[BigBlackEquus]

Yes, there will probably be issues. I have tried to do this before, and it wouldn't work. I always got weird windows code errors and/or warnings about it not being the correct computer.

The work-around (at least it used to be, unless what platz is saying is true) is to install using another windows CD (non-dedicated to a vendor), but the key code from the HP/Compaq disk will work fine. You can even use Korean Windows version serials with English disks. They are interchangable.

By the way, I have attempted to re-install XP on two different Samsung computers -- using the exact disks that came with them -- and they didn't work. I half wonder if Samsung either has incompetent code writers, or if they do it on purpose so people have to pay for a service call after warranty. Samsung is the devil.

[plattwaz]