FINALLY! Clean Vista install with activation!

FINALLY! IT WORKED! This is what I did...

1] Used the recovery disks to reinstall Vista.

2] The machine booted a bunch of times and then at one point logged in to Vista by itself. A program called "FBI something" began to execute to install rest of the software. This is an HP program. I KILLED THAT PROGRAM USING TASK MANAGER. I took this idea from some other person who has already posted how to do this in this forum.

3] Brought up the Vista activation window. Note that the product key shown here is different than the one on the label pasted on the bottom of the notebook. DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING YET.

4] Tried to activate on the Internet. It did not work and asked me to the call the toll free number and provided a long key that I had to enter to get a confirmation ID.

5] The automated phone system did not work either and it automatically transferred me to MS customer service dealing with activations.

6] The person asked me for the product key FROM THE BACK OF THE NOTEBOOK and gave me the confirmation key to put in the boxes on my activation window. That was it!

PLEASE NOTE: The first time, I changed the product key (the one containing the letters 'OEM') with the one on label on the bottom of the notebook AND THEN tried to activate it following the rest of the steps described above. IT DID NOT WORK AND MICROSOSFT CUST SERV COULD NOT FIGURE IT OUT EITHER. I noticed that the key generated using the product key on the back of the notebook was different than the one generated when I left the OEM key in there. Perhaps this is the, er..., key to the solution?

7] I have now a clean Vista install and my experience index has bumped up to 4.9 from 3.5. If this methods works for you please let everyone else know by posting here.

The one thing I noticed was that my drive 0 had only a 5 GB partition with the rest allocated (I drive is 130 gb I think). It was easy to fix using Vista's disk management utility.

 

thanks for the guide and congrats on getting it to work

 

couldn't you just have run the clean install guide that Orev created? That seems a lot easier then what you did.

 

wow this sounds great!!!!!!!!!
i don't have access to the anytime upgrade so i will try this!!!!

 

Unfortunately, it was too late for me to try and do what he suggested because I had already gotten rid of the recovery partition. And the recovery disks that HP sent don't really restore the machine because of a problem with them - and luckily the problem with those recovery dvds occurs after the OS is installed.