Hi Carey,
It got the better of me so I decided to check the valdity of the COA attatched to the laptop. The Microsoft site also checked for a genuine OS at the same time and came up with a non genuine result for the OS but said the the COA product key was good. It then said I would be able to use the COA key to update the OS at no cost and gave me a link to an MS program that replaced the bad key with the good COA key. My dodgy OS is now 100% legal and has recieved all its updates and I'm not out of pocket at all. Can't complain about that!!!