Has anyone ran into OEM serials such as dell and not working with another OEM disks.

[Duke523]

Has anyone ran into OEM serials such as dell and not working with another OEM disks.

Ok, My friends has a compaq that has oem licence of XP Home, my OEM Home disk does not take the serial...during setup or if I enter mine and change it to his after install is done and when it gos to register.

Same with my other friends Dell with XP pro...It won't take it either.

And at work I have had two machines with Dells with 2000 do it too.

For XP Pro I have the following disks:
Retail
Retail SP2
OEM
Upgrade

For Home I have:
Retail
OEM
OEM SP2
VLM
Upgrade
Upgrade Sp2

Yeah I have tried the serials on everyone one of the disks...nope.

So I bring up the question

So why the Hell do they bother makeing stickers/licence certificates and put on these machines? They need to all start going back to giving out the OEM disks with respected serial/licence....but then they could not charge people for haveing to reinstall every time something goes wrong with their custumers PCs.

[AllGamer]

yes both Dell, Compaq and even IBM will only sell HARD coded Windows

which mean if you try to use it on anything else besides their own machine will not work.

Which is actually valid

that is the whole point of OEM.

if you want a generic OEM windows, then you need to buy it from a local computer warehouse

[Duke523]

Originally posted by AllGamer
yes both Dell, Compaq and even IBM will only sell HARD coded Windows

which mean if you try to use it on anything else besides their own machine will not work.

A postive side to the issue...piracy control. Keeps people from putting it on all their machines.

But still....if the code won't work with oem disk....at least they need to do is allow an option on there backup/recovry disk to chose not to install the compaq/dell/IBM etc. software(also called a waste of HDD space).

[AllGamer]

True...
i really hated that thing the most about those big companies

everytime windows **** out, and you need to reload

then you are forced to use those **** CDs

and the worse part is, that you will lose your data.

well thanks goodness lately in the last few years they finally saw the light of that and now they are giving the CDs of their separate softwares, so you don't have to load the **** junks all over again, instead you can now finally only re-install the OS

[r8500]

Well, Dell gives you 2 cd's. One is the OS cd, just like OEM copy, but with the key embedded in it.

The other is their Applications CD.

And I think they may give a 3rd now that I am thinking about it, with the Drivers on it.

[rraehal]

My Dell only came with a CD that install XP Pro SP2. Nothing else attached. The first thing I did was format and reinstall when I got the PC. I then installed the Office Suite (Again Microsoft Branded - not Dell).

I then put on my software and updated the Microsoft drivers to vendor/manuafcturer drivers.

[Duke523]

Yeah, compaq gives you two disks and it require both...but I haven't messed around with it much yet...it might let chose not to install it...but he said it does not allow for you to do that.

[krazefinn]

Actually, that used to be the case with compaq, that you had to run the quikrestore disc first. However I recently ordered free xp pro replacement discs, and without reading instructions, did clean install with OS only, then saw ythe directions for the other disc :"always install quikrestore first". I think that formats and partitions the systemsave junk. However, with the clean install only, been running better than b4, and did NOT use the other compaq disc. EvoD300S p4.

[Guille_Expat]

I have no problems w/ my dell oem xp.

My dell came with the home xp cd and the application disk. I have had to reformatt my notebook a few weeks ago, because of conflict with Norton Internet Security (never again).

It was not problem at all, I just followed the manual exactly to reformatt and xp installed just fine. Without having to do the key/serials bit. And yeah, there's a sticker underneath my notebook with serial key # etc. And I saved all my file into folders on to blank cd's, never lost anything.

I even tried to install the xp home disc in another pc just to test it. And true, it will only work with the Dell pc you have. I'm glad, cuz it helps combat piracy.

[stix_kua]

Is this legal?

Is it legal to use a serial elsewhere?

[stix_kua]

C R A P is filtered now too?


Testing:
****

Geez, I never thought **** was a swear word. Easy on the filters:(