I am helping a friend who has a Dell Inspiron N5105 laptop running Vista Home Premium.
It was supplied only recently as part of an insurance claim settlement - she was told it had just been built for her specifically so she expected it to be problem free.
The internet works fine and she can check her email and facebook, etc - but although Skype 4.2 is pre-installed she cannot logon to the service using her ID and password, and neither can I, it just says for ages "Signing in" and eventually "Skype cannot connect to your account - for help click here" but that link doesn't work either.
She has asked for a password reset and logged onto the Skype website to complete this successfully, but the client still does the above - and the same with my own account.
Also, the screen to activate her copy of MS Office XP is corrupted (just showing as blank box!).
To try to resolve both problems, I backed up her files (only a few) and did a factory reset from the recovery partition. The Skype problem remains.
The Office activation wizard now offers to activate over the internet ... but says it can't make a connection to the server, and when I try to use the telephone method it refuses to give us a phone number to call.
I have connected the laptop to a different internet connection and the problems remain.
She tells me that her boss is also unable to activate the latest version of Office that they have too, so this isn't just a Office XP issue (which I realise is 10 years old).
Everything worked perfectly on her old computer, but of course it was stolen in the burglary.
I am at a loss to explain why this is happening with a brand new computer, especially after a factory reset. Can you help me ?