virtualbox.org

Hi all,

Helping out my Mom - her ancient XP home laptop is dying, so I did a P2V (using vmware converter) and added it to virtualbox.

The issue - of course it needs activation (3 days). I am 99% sure it is an OEM copy of XP Home. I tried online activation and it did not work.

Q - can I buy a RETAIL license and use it - even if it was originally OEM?

Any help greatly appreciated,

Rob

Those are questions that should be directed to Microsoft, not VirtualBox...

sternfan wrote: Q - can I buy a RETAIL license and use it - even if it was originally OEM?

Almost certainly not. The product key ranges for retail are not the same as for OEM, and an installer CD from one market branch will not accept product keys from another.

In any case it may not work at all. You don't mention the make of laptop, but if it was Dell or HP then XP licenses were often "node locked", meaning that the activation function would check that the current hardware is a Dell or HP, and refuse to activate on anything else. This is quite separate from the marketing channel issue.

If it's going to work at all I suspect you would need an OEM license, then I'd Google for solutions to replace the node locked license with a generic OEM one.

This problem is only going to get worse. You might find it more sensible in the long run to bite the bullet now and start migrating your Mom onto a new Win10 PC. In desktop mode it's really not so different from XP, or at least can be made to appear so.

I downloaded some original xp VOL, and it automatically gets activated (i use some product keys from google search), no need to hack anything. The same happens with windows 10. I don't know it it in bios something or what. Previously i had OEM version and had to hack its activation always, using AntiWPA.

This is the second time that I'm going to have to warn you. No talking about circumventing copy protection measures, keys not acquired from the proper channels or "activators". The next such message will be deleted without any warning.