Phone activation called me a pirate :D

omg...I keep going to System & Security to look at where it says "Windows Is Activated"

Congratulations on a job well done. Glad it works for you now.

Aw thanks everyone :) This is such a friendly forum

I would still love to know exactly why this went wrong to be honest, but I doubt I will ever really know for sure. From the look on the faces of the people in the store they looked very confused at the whole situation, but who really knows what happened

I think maybe someone put the wrong key in it.

Orrr, someone replaced the original with another one. Someone might have opened the box, brought a business type serial, and took out the one you bought. Could be it, I doubt it though. But I guess you never will know. It sounded to me like the store was trying to put you through a circle and just didn't really care if you got the wrong serial number, and wanted blame for it. Typical store in the U.S, really.

Reminds me of a CompUSA store in my area went out of business in '08. And CompUSA had to close 100 of their stores in LA because they weren't making enough money. They made the prices higher than the other places, and didn't give out enough discount deals, so not many people went to the stores. They really were money suckers, that's for sure.

Anyway, not meaning to get off-track, but I hope your computer works fine in the near future.

My own computer had it's own problem with the update feature for a good month or more, and it finally fixed itself a few weeks ago. Now I can download updates once more. I honestly have no idea why the computer suddenly wanted to fix the auto-update feature through the System Restore one day. It fixed my Windows Update feature, but also uninstalled one of my games I installed the day before. lol. Kinda sucks seeing as I had to re-download the game and reinstall it. Oh well.

I saw a couple times news about legal software printed in local, authorized disc presses, which unfortunately came with misplaced labels, which ended up exactly as the OP states. Discs were 100% legal, keys were 100% legal, but they were both in the wrong boxes.

Definitively a manufacturing issue -- their internal warehouse supply teams failed badly.

Good work.

When you have Win7 set up as you like be sure to save a Win7 Backup Image externally so you never have to reinstall again to this machine - just reimage the HD or replacement using DVD Repair console and stored image.

Your retail Win7 can also migrate to the machine of your choice for life. So safeguard the key and back up DVD.