I haven't had much experience with xp yet, but I just replaced my 
motherboard and windows xp required 'activation'.  I had to call 
microsoft activation service, give them the number off the activation 
screen, verbally confirm that it was only installed on one computer.  
They also asked for the product key, which I found on the sticker 
printed sideways - should be something like  X10-11111.  This should 
also appear on a CD, if one was delivered with the computer.  It took me 
three calls, once to go thru the process only to stop because I didn't 
have the product key (I didn't know it was on the sticker), once they 
disconnected me and a third time to successfully receive a new one-time 
use code to activate.   I suppose you shouldn't have any problems as 
long as you install what was originally delivered with the machine and 
the sticker is in place and readable.
Paul Hachmeyer
.
JJ wrote:

> System - eMachine T1100
> XP Home
>
> Working on for acquaintance. Once machine booted clicking on any user 
> account resulted in machine rebooting. Had some other issues as well. 
> No restore CDs came with machine. Decided to just reformat and 
> resinstall XP Home from a CD I had using the KEY on the sticker on 
> back of machine.  When I put in the "product key" as listed on the 
> machine I get an "Invalid Key" response.  Doing some net searching I 
> found a reference to the fact that eMachines evidently put the 
> activation key on the sticker not the product key. Oops. Well, the c:\ 
> has been formatted so trying to retrieve what the actual key was is a 
> moot point on c:\. Not real familiar with eMachines but there is a 
> second partition on the drive that's FAT32 and appears to have 
> something on it. Is this a restore function? If so how do you 
> access\run the restore?
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Jayne Johnston
> [log in to unmask]
>     


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