Dell's Reinstallation DVD and COA's.

Sometime ago, Dell had sent me a Vista Ultimate Reinstallation DVD as a make right for a system they mistakenly preinstalled with Xp. It was a fortuitous mistake however, because among other things, Nvidia was having problems with Vista drivers at the time.

I used the system as delivered and forgot about the VU DVD until a recent HD upgrade. I noticed that XP and the rest of the preinstalled S/W self activated. Pretty cool, no entering of key codes and all that bs. But how did XP self activate? Bios info or cpu serials? I doubt that the COA is programmed into the hardware.

So back to the Vista DVD. This is a sealed envelope with Dell's p/n and coding but it occurred to me that Dell did not supply me with a Vista COA. If I wanted to, could I have just as easily reinstalled Vista and would it have activated itself using my machine's info? Or, was Dell sending me a DVD that would have amounted to a waste of my time?

 

Yep-I didn't have to worry about product keys or anything like that. I know that older ( I'm talking like 1998 here) HP's had their OS installs/recovery disk's "tatooed" to the motherboard to prevent piracy. Who knows if they still do that today...

 

The operating systems preinstalled on machines "preactivate" because they're using generic manufacturer's keys that are registered with Microsoft.

 

Does this mean that the Vista Reinstallation Disc that Dell sent me will auto activate even though XP was preinstalled on my machine?

 

Yep.. They are basically preactivated keys, that check for the BIOS information to determine the manufacturer...

 

thank you.

 

I did a reinstall of Vista on this M1330 and nothing was required after starting the disk.

 

hi think i can get a copy of that dvd i have to restore my vista on my laptop m1330 be do not have the install dvd thank you in addvance