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Upgrading a laptop with XP, any advice? RRS feed

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    Ok here we are, I'm about to upgrade a customers Dell laptop.

    Wants a larger hardrive and more memory.

    Has XP OS with recovery partition on the harddrive and 2 licence numbers, the COA sticker one and the OEM batch one.

    So how do I go about getting XP onto the new harddrive? There is no tool, unlike HP laptops, that let me burn an OEM recovery CD.

    I do have another XP disk pre SP1 (and pre Validation) but I suspect activation will throw a wobbler if I use it.

    So anyone ever done this before and got any advice?
    Thursday, January 8, 2009 8:16 PM

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    GatorHex,

    Thank you for contacting the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program forum. Your question concerning upgrading and recovery media is out of scope for the WGA forum, as well as outside of my area of expertise. In an effort to assist I can say that the bits on the media do need to match the Product Key. Using any XP disk can result in Validation problems. In your case, if you are unable to create a restore disk from the computer, you will need to contact the computer manufacturer (Dell) and obtain a restore disk/get assistance from them on how to do this. Every OEM (like Dell, HP Compaq, Toshiba, Lenovo, Gateway) is different. Which is what makes an OEM license different from a retail license- terms and agreemtents of transferability.

    Please do contact Dell before you proceed further.

    This may or may not assist you further in your reinstallation. Unofficially, I'd like to remind you to make sure you have all Product Key/software on hand, passwords/website links written, personal files backed up, drivers for your various hardware on hand, including this in case you need it:

    Also you may reference the following site for various Telephone Activation Centers:

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326851

    Just in case you have an issue.

    Good Luck and Thank you for visitng the WGA program forum.

    Rick

    • Marked as answer by RickImAPC Thursday, January 8, 2009 9:19 PM
    Thursday, January 8, 2009 9:19 PM