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#21
I apologize for bothering you with my question. I'm sorry nobody had an answer. I'll leave you alone. Thanks for your involvement.
I apologize for bothering you with my question. I'm sorry nobody had an answer. I'll leave you alone. Thanks for your involvement.
You aren't bothering us and it's not that we don't have an answer for you however you didn't provide us with enough information to help you.
You didn't post any additional information after this. We need more information to determine what is going on. Without that we can't help you.
...and you never answered the question I asked in post #16:
My purpose in asking this question was, if you have a Windows 7 OEM sticker on your computer, you have a known good install key to use in activating Windows 7 on this computer. This will eliminate lots of potential issues.
So if you did not use that key, but you had that key, you could reactivate Windows 7 using that key and thereby put your Windows 7 install on a much firmer footing. Or, if you prefer, do a clean install with the known good key.
I guess I need to follow up with you guys. I'm a former systems integrator who has built and sold thousands of computers. I know how Microsoft works and I know how to install win 7 correctly. My confusion was that I had an installation that was activated just as it should be but, strangely, continued to deliver popups telling me that wasn't true. I had never encountered it before.
The popups self corrected. I can't tell you why but they simply stopped appearing. Windows 7 is still activated and updating normally. I was about to get out another copy of Win 7 and install it but the problem stopped by itself. My wild guess is this. Some HP computers have a routine in firmware that looks for and expects to find an HP issued version of Windows. I've had them refuse to install other OEM software from time to time. But I've never seen popups that disagreed with a successful installation. I could be wrong but I doubt seriously that Microsoft is the culprit.
If you would like to speculate, please help yourself.
I have heard of cases where an activated and genuine Windows install will start telling you that it is not genuine, forcing you to reactivate it. I believe that your license store gets corrupted, thereby preventing Windows from seeing that you do have a good license for Windows.
There is a fix for this whenever it happens, but I don't recall what that fix is.
The reason I was asking about the sticker was because if you have a sticker with a Windows 7 license key, you can use that license key to do a clean install of the same version of Windows 7 (Home, Professional, etc.). In other words, you won't need to buy a Windows 7 license; you already have one.
You did a clean install of Windows 7 on a separate hard drive, so hopefully you checked to see if there was a Windows 7 license key sticker before buying one.