I bought an HP slimline awhile ago, which was a big mistake. I’ve used it to record TV which has worked well. However this past week the damn thing died on me. I took it to the local computer shop to have them look at it and because it’s an HP they do not have the proper power supply to test it.
I said screw it and bought a new case and new motherboard, everything else transfered. After getting everything installed I turned on the machine. I keep getting the same screen that says trying to repair windows. Then restarts then keeps doing the same thing.
From what I’ve gathered you can not exchange a motherboard with Vista without jumping through some hoops. Mostly you have to reinstall and call Microsoft.
However, HP does not send out installation disks, a fact I didn’t pay attention to because we had just bought two other machines that both came with disks.
I’ve been looking around a lot of different forums and seen two differing opinions, one says Microsoft will not allow me to use another disk to reinstall Vista at all because the OEM is attached to the old motherboard. The other says they will if I tell them the board died, which it did. However, a lot of the posts that I’ve seen are a year or so old so I don’t know what the new answer is.
I’d like to know if I’ll have any real problems with Microsoft and trying to reinstall Vista with another OEM copy of Vista. Will the reinstall kill everything I had on the machine, it wasn’t much though there were some shows I wanted to burn.
I’m sure I’ll think of more later, but that’s what I’d like to know for now so when I go home tonight I know what I’ll be dealing with.
I’m not a hardware person, but AFAIK Windows does have some unfortunate and annoying low-level limitations due to which you pretty much have to build the installation up on the destination motherboard-- so yeah, if you switch motherboards out from under it, you’re likely hosed. But it doesn’t really have anything to do with OEM or license keys, it’s just not “built for that hardware”. It’s plausible that you could boot from the install media in a “repair” mode and it would magically fix itself, but I wouldn’t put any hopes on it.
But while repair might be impossible, reinstallation is not really a problem: you won’t be able to use a Vista installation disk from a the same or even a different OEM (assuming the OEM disks have an “OEM Activation” aka “SLP” license key set in them which hooks to the BIOS for validation), but if you can scare up a generic retail install disk or even an OEM disk that doesn’t have the SLP key integrated then you should be totally fine: the license key on the COA that came with the system should work perfectly fine (the printed license keys aren’t really bound to the OEM SLP in any fashion and will work on any system).
Some OEMs will send you repair/install media if you call and ask nicely, but if they’ve done anythign especially clever like an image-based restore solution instead of vanilla install media, that will be hard to work with too.
When you get the reinstall going, it’ll scan your drives and notice that there’s a previous copy of Windows already there-- you can tell it to keep that stuff so you can salvage it later, but it’ll leave your file system messier than you might care for. A good plan of action might be to reinstall once the messy way just so you can retrieve your data, then reinstall again with a clean format.
From what I’ve read though is that Vista knows if the key has already been used before and doesn’t allow you to use the same key again. I’ve heard that you can call Microsoft and they will give you a new key once, but I’ve heard the other way too that they will not. I really don’t want to have to buy Vista again since I’ve paid for it once.
They don’t actually enforce this as strictly as people think. I’ve got a Media Center machine running Vista Ultimate which has had a complete hardware swap three times, and I’ve done a full reinstall and activation with the same key all three times. Each time after the first, I expected that I might have to call Microsoft and do some pleading to get the key to work, but it always worked. Now, this wasn’t an OEM version so there could conceivably be different limitations, but you’re completely in the right here, so at the very least, you shouldn’t have to repurchase the OS. You’re doing something perfectly legitimate by replacing a dead part of a computer you own.
Also, if it came with Vista pre-installed from Dell, most likely the OEM had applied an SLP key to the system and thus the license key contained on the COA sticker itself has never actually been expended.
Otherwise, worst case is a phone call at activation time to explain the situation.
Generally speaking the only truly legal OEM motherboard swap situations are for failures. That said, it happens all the time, daily, in damn near every puter shop in existence and it would be a bear to enforce.
One of the things to look for also is if it all possible try and get a motherboard with the same chipset manufacturer. Its frightening how often you can swap a board and reboot when both boards had intel/ATI/VIA/whatever chipsets even when the version is different.
I’m sure Apple and several of the Lunux houses are fantasizing about the day Microsoft clamps down on OEM licences harder. If I could not replace a mobo without buying a new windows licence you would probably see me making some phone calls to other OS manufacturers as well.