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Friday 18 October 2013

WIndows activation

When a machine is reinstalled (see NickWorks Services), re-entering the product key should allow Windows to be activated. It requires that you install the right version of Windows to match the key - so before starting to reinstall, it is important to have these two pieces of information.

Every Windows PC should have a sticker on the case with this information on it - but it is sometimes missing or too faded to read (this happens a lot on laptops).

Luckily there are a few utilities that allow recovery of this information from the Windows registry. It's encrypted, so it can't be read directly.

I used ProduKey, which makes it quite easy. It can access the information on an external disk or USB key, so if Windows won't boot, you can still get the code, as long as the disk still functions.

If the code is barred by Microsoft, it could indicate that the installed version of Windows was from a suspect source.

Wednesday 2 October 2013

Corrupted profile issues

I have seen this problem a couple of times: the user can't log in and gets a "The User Profile Service failed the logon" message. The cure is to swap the registry entries relating to the profile and its backup. 
But if the locked-out user is the only administrator there is a problem. On this laptop I had to
(1) Boot from the built in Windows repair (equivalent to booting from the Windows DVD) and start a command prompt.
(2) Run regedit to edit the registry to enable the built-in administrator account  (http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/102552-built-administrator-enable-winre.html)
 (3) Log in with this account and fix the profile (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947215)