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#11
The OP still seems to work for the company. That should be OK. Selling it would be another matter.
The Licensing rules are very clear - If the machine belongs to the company, then a Volume license is valid.
When the company disposes of the machine they are *required* by the terms of the Volume license to reformat to remove the license, it's then up to them as to whether they reinstall the original OS from backup/media or not.
In this case there appears to be an Activation Exploit present - the SLIC table in the BIOS is apparently Win7-compliant, which should not be the case for a machine with a Vista sticker.
Having said that, the motherboard here has a BIOS date of 2011 -putting it firmly in Win7 territory, and the Studio XPS 1340 appears to be solely a Win7 era machine.
So there is definitely some strange about this!
What does the case of the machine claim is the model number??
Thank you again Noel.
This is what I needed confirmation on.
When the company disposes of the machine they are *required* by the terms of the Volume license to reformat to remove the license, it's then up to them as to whether they reinstall the original OS from backup/media or not.
I do indeed still work for the company. It is largely a Macintosh workplace, but the company has provided me with two dell laptops, one of which I keep at home to use as I see fit (admin privileges, install/unistall, etc). The XPS 1340 is from 2009, I believe, and has a Vista decal on the bottom right corner of the keyboard panel. I've had the laptop since 2011 and it has had WIN 7 x64 the whole time.
Not sure when I'll get a chance to deal further with this via MS or my work IT folks, but I'll post a reply here when I do.
Thanks again for the discussion.
Do you know if your company is enrolled in the Microsoft Partner Network by any chance?
If they are, then the license you have will no longer work as Windows 7 has been retired from their software benefits in November 30th, 2013. They should only have Windows 8 and 8.1. licenses available for Internal Use/Production.
The users who try to use an activation key for Win7 will receive multiple error messages in that scenario.
The Windows License here is the OEM_SLP one - so discussion of Volume licensing is irrelevant.
The BIOS date is 2011 - sot it's more likely to be a Windows 7 PC than a Vista one.
The problem is almost certainly purely because of reinstalling from retail media using the EOM_SLP Key rather than the proper COA or Retail Key.