tonyM

Yes, contacting MS directly by phone was inevitable, but as feared, completely useless. Putting aside the language difficulties and hours wasted I still cannot Activate my brand new OS. My shrink-wrapped package came with 2 dvds (32-bit and R2 64 bit) and on the inside of the packaging is affixed the usual MS product key label. All persons I spoke to said Yes, this is a valid product key and the sku-xx looks good. The last person I spoke too was confident that this key was showing to him as explicitly an R2 key and that "the best I can suggest is you obtain a valid Vista key at your local retailer" and that should work. What the heck is going on here???? I do believe this was a valid MS packaged box. There is no hint otherwise. Naturally, I am already very tempted to revert to server 2003. Any thoughts? tonyM

I recently purchased an still shrinked box of Windows Server 2008 Standard. I am upgrading a server from 2003 to 2008 (hardware and tools here are all 32-bit). It Installed in a snap (on a nice big clean drive). Then I realized the clock was ticking on activation. I have tried two options concerning activation. [ACTIVATE WINDOWS ONLINE] Click the button, wait 1 minute and I recieve Windows Activation Error Code 0x8007232B Description: DNS name does not exist (my research finds lots of talk about KMS Host servers, but I'm unsure if/how that might apply to a lone machine in my office used to run vmware) So, the other choice is, [CHANGE PRODUCT KEY] I enter the key taken from the nice plastic box, 25 chars, and after about a minute it tells me, "The Product key you have entered does not appear to be valid" ****, they have me coming and going. Is there someone out there that can shed light on this, please? tonyM