I am being required to activate windows and office again after a 4.0 upgrade. I tried to re-activate my MS Office that I did purchase but because windows is a peice of crap and I have to keep reinstalling it I have exeeded my allowable installs. This is causing a huge headache. I did backup my old Parallels with everything running fine but would like to upgrade without this activation mess. Any Ideas?
Unfortunately Microsoft require activation when hardware is changing, and we changed hardware in PD4, thus there is no way to avoid it, but simple call to Microsoft will resolve the situation
Re authorizing XP is simple. If you have exceeded your number of no challenge reauthorizations just click the telephone link in the Windows error message. Microsoft now just uses a phone robot instead of an actual live person in a third world country to grant new serial numbers. The correct answer is you only installed XP on one computer and the hardware has changed. The robot should automatically give you a new XP serial number. It worked fine for me today.
Thanks for the replys. I know thie steps to reactivate but am having issues with my software activation. I was just wondering if there was any way around this for parallels.
Interesting that neither my XP Pro SP3 nor MS Office 2007 required reactivation after my upgrade to PD4. Well, at least not yet - sure it is a delayed fuse waiting for me to be on the road w/o my install CD's. -E
WinXP Activation after 4.0 Upgrade I upgraded to Parallels 4.0 yesterday and got the Windows activation message. I had to call and use the phone-bot. That worked great and I was reactivated in about 5 minutes. Bud James
I believe that if you have an enterprise/OEM/business license key for XP, common to all machines at your company, then you do not need to re-activate. Seems to be the case for me, anyhow.
i have never pretended to understand windows activation because yes i do have an msdn subscription, and sometimes i have to reactivate and sometimes i do not. i was just certain that moving from p3 to p4 and adding that extra core and updated device drivers would trigger reactivation. guess not.