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[Millicent Bystander]

My sister in law works as a manager at a nursing home the has recently become independant of the NHS and they are having a clearout.  Amongst the rubbish they were clearing out she found a pile of discs manuals and odd wires which she brought to me to see if I could find a use for them. 

Amongst the rubbish I unearthed a USB printer cable, a network cable, some Dell Latitude driver discs, a Dell Windows XP Pro SP3 disc and a Dell Windows Vista Business 32 Bit SP1 Disc, unfortunatly there were no licences.  Despite these being quite recent versions I've been assured they are rubbish.

My question is, does anyone know if these can be used as a normal OS (providing a licence can be found) or are these for Dell PCs only.

[Zarf]

should work with any oem license key (the ones they stick on the pc)

[Chaos]

nah I tried this before.. they're preloaded with special dell crap that can tell what mobo you're using. If you try to install it, it wont activate.. but somehow, the same key will activate on another pc (as long as your not using it on the origional)

[Magathery]

It's worth a punt. But the Dell branding will pop up all over the place. It's just software after all. It's the licence key that is inportant.

A few months back my brother got an ASUS laptop. One of the first things he wanted to do to is was fit a larger hard drive. But as is the fashion, there was no windows disk. Part of the original hard drive had been partisioned to work with the "Recovery disk". Pha! Through a friend of a friend kind of thing a Vista Home Premium 32bit disk was aquired from some one with a Dell. It installed fine and worked after updateing drivers and stuff. And yes it activated and worked fine. So that was using the licence number that was on the laptop in the first place, coupled with an instalation disk supplied with a Dell PC / laptop. I'm assuming it is still working fine for the bastard that eventauly stole it out of my brothers car. But that aside, the only clue that something wasn't out of the box fresh was the fact that the Dell logo was some how writen into things. System info screen for example.

[Power]

Well system info screen is easy. There are even a couple of free tools around that allow you to put your face in there. But yeah, from my experience it's all about the product keys.

[egg]

Well system info screen is easy. There are even a couple of free tools around that allow you to put your face in there. But yeah, from my experience it's all about the product keys.

HKLM/SW/MS/Windows NT/ 

Registered owner and Registered organisation are the reg keys to alter the text in system properties

[Finaldeath]

I've no idea, but frankly Vista has the workaround that the Anytime Upgrade DVD (which is usually all the install DVD's) basically goes off the key, so even OEM keys work.

We use this to reinstall student laptops at my university using their legal copy of Vista without lots of the cruff that might come from a restore off those OEM DVD's.

XP is different, you need the Volume Licence Key version.

As for using it on machines they were not done for, I've honestly no idea. I think the OEM keys might not authorise correctly...

However in any case do you care? I mean, you could just get a key generator if you really wanted a licence-breaking copy of Windows XP or Vista...I mean honestly, this is a bemusing conversation since if the key is invalidated you can't ring up Microsoft to complain since it isn't on the right hardware (yes, it's crap, but it's their crap).