theprawn

Thanks Guys - I have known about this OEM activation for a few years(Dell recovery CD), but never got around to sorting how it was implemented(equipment has always been data wiped before we get it). This will save me and my colleges loads of MS phone calls (upto 40 a day!! we were letting the customer activate them until recently - hence this search to here plus loads of read and downloads). A couple of questions (I have hundreds of syspreped Ghost images of different systems from 98SE to Vista). 1. I am re-image old XP Pro a after changing the Productkey in sysprep.inf and copying OEMBIOS.DAT,.SIG, & .BIN to system32 folder and .DAT .CAT to sytem32/catroot{xxx} folder. Will I also need to copy .CAT to dllcache or delete it from there(worried about SFC.exe)? Otherwise seems to work fine. 2. Havn't tried this on XP Home, but could I change an installed Image from COA to SLP as Home doesn't have Sysprep? (KeyUpdatetool or MagicJellybean?) 3. I take it you know how to Activate Royal OEM Vista with OEM.XRM-MS files and SLMGR -ILC etc as you have Vista SLIC certs But havn't read anything here? Found this out about month ago, so thought it was time to sort OEM XP out as well ) plus a bonus Tablet and MCE. Thanks again for all your hard work and time. The Prawn NB. Why Microsoft choose this route, I don't understand, seems double standards and/or greed, but that's another story.