[annabell]

Hi All,
I hope you can help, my husband has been given a laptop for work use, it is mainly for diagnositc use, and so an old model is fine. It came with Windows 2000 installed and had not really been used at all, and as it turns out not connected to the net for updates for ages....

My ever helpful son connected to the net and allowed windows to update, and we believe it installed service pack 4. Upon restart we are now required to add the product key.....we have entered in the one on the bottom of the laptop, but no joy! It tells us the key is not valid.

It seems to have completely installed a new program, and seems to be going through a new full setup! We have no new product key, and have no idea what to do now.

All help greatly apprectiated, as we cannot get into anything on the lap top at all!

Thanks in advance, Annabell

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Annabell, this is a long shot but worth a try.

Boot to Safe Mode. Login as Administrator (no password hopefully).
Open Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel
See if SP4 is listed there and if so, uninstall it for now.

If that works then download Magic Jellybean Keyfinder (keyfinder.exe) and run it. It will tell you what the corect key is.

Hmmm, as a matter of fact, if you can login as Administrator in Safe mode, you can run keyfinder.exe from a flash drive or floppy drive then you will have the key you need. Shutdown and reboot and use the correct key.

[Ztruker]

Annabell, this is a long shot but worth a try.

Boot to Safe Mode. Login as Administrator (no password hopefully).
Open Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel
See if SP4 is listed there and if so, uninstall it for now.

If that works then download Magic Jellybean Keyfinder (keyfinder.exe) and run it. It will tell you what the corect key is.

Hmmm, as a matter of fact, if you can login as Administrator in Safe mode, you can run keyfinder.exe from a flash drive or floppy drive then you will have the key you need. Shutdown and reboot and use the correct key.

[annabell]

Thanks Ztrucker,

The thing will not even open in safe mode! We caved and rang microsoft to be told that the key we have is valid, but that they no longer support windows 2000, and so cannot help us.......So Frustrating!!!!

My husband has canabalised another lap top from work and switched the hard drives, so at least he now has a working one.

Care factor at microsoft is amazing low, even when we explained that the laptop was working just fine untill we downloaded the recommended updates from microsoft! Only suggestion was find an old copy of windows and re-install it (don:t know how to do that as we cannot get past the page asking for the product key, and it will not open in safe mode) Other than that the answer is basically "tough"

Thanks again for the suggestions, and if you come up with any other ideas let me know!

Many thanks, Annabelle