A few months ago I bought a laptop here in Costa Rica. It came with Vista Home Premium in Spanish. Earlier this week I bought a desktop in the USA which came with Vista Home Premium OEM, and I also picked up a retail copy of Vista Home Premium in English for my laptop.
This gives me 2x Vista Home Premium OEM licenses (1 English, 1 Spanish) and 1x Vista Home Premium retail license.
The desktop of course came with a load of garbage pre-installed, and as is the fashion these days no 'clean' operating system disks.
So I formatted the desktop and installed Vista using my retail dvd and initially had to use the retail product key which is in use by my laptop. I changed the product key to the OEM license printed on the side of my desktop, but it is unable to activate using this key.
How am I able to activate Vista on my desktop?
Edit: The results of the Genuine Advantage diagnostic tool using the product key from my desktop I'm trying to validate says:
OEM installation media (disc) contains an OEM license. The OEM licensing terms differ from retail licensing terms. A product key only works to unlock a specfic license. That is why a retail product key cannot be used with an OEM installation disc.
Well that's retarded, pointless and stupid. 'Clean' OEM discs are virtually extinct thanks to vendors selling out and wanting to lock you into all the trialware and crapware they preinstall. I haven't actually received any Windows discs for the last 5 or 6 machines I've purchased.
Oh well. Phone validation worked at least so it is still possible to use a retail disc to do fresh installs over crippled OEM ones.
OEM installation media (disc) contains an OEM license. The OEM licensing terms differ from retail licensing terms. A product key only works to unlock a specfic license. That is why a retail product key cannot be used with an OEM installation disc.
