Tuesday, January 29, 2013

I Am A Microsoft Software Pirate

... but I don't want to be.

My Lamborghini laptop (Asus G73S) had a hard drive failure recently. I had prepared myself for this situation and had the Asus recovery DVDs standing by. I bought a replacement hard drive, installed it and went to work restoring the thing. On DVD #2 of 6, the restore failed.

Yarr!  Oops, I mean, Argh!

I've got the Win7 full install disk from the Catican PC, so I took a chance with that one, hoping I could use the Win7 product key from the laptop.

Bzzzt! Wrong answer. The Lamborghini key is for Win7 Professional and the Win7 install disk was Home Premium. They didn't match up and the product key failed. I shrugged and decided to throw caution to the wind and just reused the Catican's product key. It worked.

So now I've got two PCs in the same house running Win7 using the same product keys. I'm a pirate. I don't want to be a pirate, but I can't figure out how to make this work. I don't have a Win7 Professional install disk or even an upgrade disk.

Yarr! Leave a solution in the comments and I'll give ye a share of our doubloons!

4 comments:

Tots said...

I'm sorry, but I must report you to the proper authorities. :)


Actually, email me. I have a solution for you.

K T Cat said...

Thanks, bruddah!

tom said...

Hah... trivial problem. Try dealing with having a disk for the right version of the OS (XPpro) but it still refuses to acknowledge legitimate license keys.

It seems that the install media comes in many flavors, and license keys aren't universally recognized. XP upgrade is different from OEM is different from the Dell version, etc.

I'm working to move that site over to Linux. Much simpler to understand.

K T Cat said...

If Linux supported Adobe Creative Suite, I'd be tempted.