[makai]

I've been building XP systems for some time now. All XP Pro OEM cds were always purchased on ebay... by myself, or by the person I was building the computer for.

Well, I just built a computer for my brother, and after loading XP, and getting to the desktop, I was expecting to see the Activation prompt. I've always gotten the prompt to activate.... on all the OEM discs I've ever used... but not this time! There was no activation tray icon, and there wasn't even an activation link in the Start menu.

This kind of took me by surprise as I've never experienced this. I know many large OEM dealers have special "pre-activated" discs, but those discs are normally labeled in some fashion as an "OEM Resource" disc... something or other. My disc looks exactly like all the other MS OEM discs I've ever seen... nice gold color, holograms embedded in the Cd itself, etc, etc.

Anyways, it didn't dawn on me to check the i386 folder for the setup.ini file or any winnt files... so... I was just curious if you guys ever ran across a similar disc with no activation... no registration prompts either, by the way. Come to think about it, it almost seems like it was slipsteamed!!

makai

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Could be a corp edition that doesn't require activation. I don't think you can get unattended setups, or slipstreamed CDs from MS.

[admin]

Could be a corp edition that doesn't require activation. I don't think you can get unattended setups, or slipstreamed CDs from MS.

[makai]

Could be a corp edition

No, it was definitely stictly the Pro version.

I normally make a backup copy of all the Xp discs since I'm basically the support for all the machines I build, but in this case I didn't. I already sent the computer to my brother, so perhaps I will ask him the burn a copy and send it to me so I can inspect it. I'm just too curious as to why there was no activation prompt and now it's really bugging me!

makai

[darth_ash]

If u want to activate windows.
Start->Run. Type oobe/msoobe /a. Press Enter.

[Johanna]

A "Corporate Version" is sort of a misnomer. It means a cd used to install XP after the purchase of a license to use on multiple systems. The way your cd behaved sure sounds like the way mine acts.

Johanna