I got took and now need help

you should have the product key for this.

Dell has your product key listed on the bottom of the laptop and the type of Operating System it belongs to.

Unless you have a FULL version of the Operating System, that belongs to the laptop and/or recovery disks, You'll have to contact the person you got it from. Dell may or may not be able to help you. There should be a service tag on the bottom.

Product keys will NOT be provided by the members here at CNET.


Good luck,


Rick

1. If there is a product key on the bottom of the computer, contact Microsoft and tell them the story.. They might be able to help.

2. Purchase a legal Windows XP disc to format and install the operating system with.

3. Purchase a USB floppy disc for use with the Windows 98 boot disc. (If the XP machine is formatted as NTFS, then be sure the boot disc includes Delpart). (Remember, if you've previously installed the "authentic Windows 98" disc and the product key that came with it, it's illegal to install it on a second machine if the original machine still is using that OS.)

4. Contact the seller of the product and get your money back because they sold you a computer with an illegal operating system on it.

5. Take the laptop's hard drive out, place it in another computer (or an external enclosure on another computer) and format it there.

5. None of the other XP discs are legal to install as their product keys have been used already on other computers.

Hope this helps.

Grif

Dell will sell XP recovery disks or the upgrade version if what was originally some win9x version, provided you can prove its yours. Just log-on to the Dell website enter your s/n and find out what was originally sold to that system. Then find the OS purchase area if one is available. Now the cost will be less than buying retail, but there is a cost.

Now MS has a problem calling real OS as non-authentic, they do have a work around if you fall into that. Check with MS and locate the cure, provided yours is authentic to begin with. Otherwise, MS does offer a "key" to make yours legal, again contact them. If yours is truly not authentic, then MS can provide a new OS for some cost and want info on the purchase, etc.. Of course the 90-days seems fishy to me, IMHO.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/support/default.mspx
http://support.microsoft.com/ph/1173

tada -----Willy

Yes, that just NEEDS to hurt!

Well, like the others are saying, first try to locate a sticker like this one:
http://safecomputing.umn.edu/images/guides/xpinstall/productkey1.png

At laptops, it's in the most cases on the under side of the laptop.

Then, get to a Windows XP cd, format the disk (the installer of XP will do that for you, just choose NTFS fast...

If you've installed it, click Start, click Run and type (without the quotes): "oobe msoobe -a". You will get a screen (you're sure from it when you've bought a CD-rom out of the SHOP, not eBay!!) in where you can activate your piece of Windows.

If it's a new Windows CD-rom, it will be registred with the new code, but if you've got a downloaded you need to change the code from the CD-rom in your legal code;

Choose, when the screen is saying that it's not working, the button with a text like "Change code", just ignore the text that you only need to click on it when you've got the message from Microsoft to do that.

Enter your legal code and click on a button with a text like "Activate".

I hope this will work, and we will hear about it

Thanks everyone, I'll go with all your suggestions. I never found the key on the bottom, but I do have the serial number and such, so I'll see what I can do.