[yobraniac]

Hello all,

A friend of mine purchased an emachine with windows 7 home premium. A mutual friend of ours thought he would be helpful and install spyware protection. Somehow someway while the friend was trying to install this "protection" some system configurations changed and according to my friend the owner of the PC, the computer would not load the OS. He said he tried using the recovery disk but it did not work. However he is not PC savvy and I have no idea what he or friend B did. Currently the PC is now running a copy of home premium that says it is not activated (friend A says he got it from a guy at work) and it says in the bottom right corner not genuine. I tried to activate it because the original PC is legit and the product key is on the side but when I click activate I get an error message.

SO with all that being said how do I go about removing what I assume is a non legit copy of that OS and reinstalling a real copy so that I can activate it using the legit key? Oh and if possible not losing the few files he has on the PC. Should I try the recovery disk first? Again he tried it but he had absolutely no idea what he was doing.

Thanks for your help.

[Advertisements]

The second OS says its invalid probably because a service pack was installed before it was put on the computer.A corporate windows DVD used to reinstall over a home edition could also cause this problem. I would use a flashdrive to copy all files he wants to save from the computer and then use a regular microsoft DVD to reinstall win 7 using the original activation code. Somewhere there should be a real activation code tag and not the one that has (oem)in the code.

SRX660

[SRX660]

The second OS says its invalid probably because a service pack was installed before it was put on the computer.A corporate windows DVD used to reinstall over a home edition could also cause this problem. I would use a flashdrive to copy all files he wants to save from the computer and then use a regular microsoft DVD to reinstall win 7 using the original activation code. Somewhere there should be a real activation code tag and not the one that has (oem)in the code.

SRX660