There's no real issue with Dell using their VLK (or rather, I imagine, a special, pre-invalidated VLK) with these machines. The situation isn't remotely as problematic as you make it out to be.
I know Dell is having, um, issues, and trying to push their service divisions, but this kind of stuff is yet another reason to keep software licensing and hardware in two different cabinets. So it sounds like Dell is reselling machines with their VLA version of Windows on it? Yeah, MS licensing will quickly throw a wet blanket on that.
Without using a driver back-up utility this often riskier than manually removing bloatware. For this reason I'm finding it's sometimes less effort to simply scrub bloatware and clean the box up -vs- trying to find some obscure touchpad driver or wi-fi add-on that only came from the factory.on another manufacturers web-site.in korean or german.
Desktops are one thing, but laptops, tablets and hybrids are increasingly a 'funkadelic' mess of drivers and hardware configs that when wiped may be next to impossible to rebuild with all the proper drivers. On a side note, I'm well aware of the bloat installed with systems like this, but I disagree with Ars stance on just blasting everything and starting fresh. It's blatant false advertising if the laptop *doesn't have a key under the battery pack. The good news is the OP caught it before updates get affected down the road. At a minimum I'd let Amazon know about the issue because they are the good guys with their return program. It was one thing in 2005 when shady internet vendors would sell discount copies of Volume Key Server 2003 with the sticker 'not for resale on them', but this is Dell.
The key you extracted was probably Dell's volume-license key, which won't install with media. I don't see how Dell in particular can shirk responsibility for the key that Dell itself provides, being no good according to Microsoft. Obviously neither Dell nor Microsoft is helping. But I like the hardware and just want a clean install of the legit copy of Windows that I've already paid for. I might be able to return the computer to Amazon based on the argument that it was defective or didn't include everything listed. So, back to the Dell site, found the relevant help page, and it said that anyone who gets that message has to buy a new licence from Microsoft. Then the man said "that key has been blocked for violating licensing terms." I said I'd bought the PC new and was entitled to a legit copy of Win 7 with it, but he just repeated that the Dell key was invalid. " for 25 characters, and the MS guy could hardly understand, and we had to go through it all about five times and finally confirmed the correct set of characters. Then there was a painful 15-minute process of having to say "Six, Robert, Bravo, Victor. The only alternative offered was a phone call.Īll the automated phone options were irrelevant, but I finally got thru to a human. I first tried with the utility provided in the Windows menu, and after contacting the MS server online it said "could not complete activation using the key you entered" or similar. The installation went fine, then it was time for "Activation". Web-searching on this issue, I retrieved Belarc Advisor, which among other things extracts the key from software.
There was none on any of the packaging, either, nor on the Dell page when I input the tag number. There is a Dell service tag number, and an "Express service" number, but none of those long groups-of-characters strings.
The first problem was, there was no "OEM license key printed on the computer". You may have to use Microsoft's phone-based activation process rather than the more convenient Internet activation will happily accept OEM license keys as long as you're using 'full install' media rather than 'upgrade' media. These downloads do not include a license or a product key to install Windows - you'll still need a valid 'full install' or OEM license and product key.