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Windows 7 activation
I have an Acer 5338 laptop which was purchased with Vista preinstalled. The deal included a free upgrade to windows 7. The computer was use for some time with Vista. I then partitioned the hard drive and dual booted the machine. I had mislaid the upgrade disks so used an alternative Windows 7 Home Premium disk and a product key which I obtained from Ebay. All worked OK for a time. Having found the upgrade discs I attempted to change the product key to the legitimate one from the Acer upgrade disc packaging. Every time I ckicked the "change product key" I got an error message. A few days ago there appeared a Windows 7 update message. So I performed a download and install of the 20 update items. I was then presented with a black screen and the message that my copy of Windows was illegal. This time the "change product key" option worked and I change the key to the good one. I was still unable to Activate. I rang Microsoft who checked the product key and told me that this was a full retail version key not OEM and I would need to reinstall and start from scratch. I do not wish to do this as I will lose all my installed programmes.
Can anyone suggest an alternative way of activating my legitimate software.
Regards All,
Wychwar