Hi,
We're an MS partner in spain. Whenever we sign up new clients we have to go through a period of checking machine by machine to see what licences they've got. This is a highly manual process, checking machine by machine by whatever means we can, to see if
they are valid.
Something we often see is where someone has supplied a pc with a valid XP licence but have just cloned a pirated windows into the box to save install time. Windows is now complaining that the licence is invalid but there is a valid XP sticker in
plain view on the box.
Our problem is that we want to gradually legalise everything but don't want to alienate the users while we do it. Installing win genuine advantage is the best way to ____ off the users while you convince the company head to start buying licences or upgrading.
I'd like to know if there is a tool I can execute on a machine by machine basis which will run a check for validity on the installed licence and tell me the licence type. Generally a vlk licence is going to be pirated. The same goes for office.
I'm looking for a command line tool which gives me something like this:
Nodename: Pc12345, User; JSmith, product: Windows XP SP3, licence type: oem, licence key: xxxxxxxxx, Licence state: valid
Nodename: Pc12345, User; JSmith, product: office xp, licence type:vlk, licence key: xxxxxx, licence state: invalid
With something like this I could rapidly run this on every box in the company and get a reasonable picture. The situation at the moment is that I simply don't take the risk of screwing up their pc but try to work out gradually what we're dealing with. In
short, a mess.
I've had loads of fun in the past attempting to legalise already installed boxes by using oobe /a. A problem I've seen with this process is that the version of windows which is installed may not be oem and so when you try to register it, it fails and you
end up being unable to go forward or backward and then you have to resinstall everything from scratch. A monumental waste of time.
We need tools to be able to check licences and to not waste time. Is there anything out there?
Ian
