Well, you don’t necessarily need the *original* installation CD, but you will need to obtain a replacement CD of the identical type (OEM vs. Retail Full Vs. retail Upgrade), if you want to use the same Product Key.

Product Keys are bound to the specific type and language of CD and/or license (OEM, Volume, retail, full, or Upgrade) with which they are purchased. For example, a WinXP Home OEM Product Key won’t work for any retail version of WinXP Home, or for any version of WinXP Pro, and vice versa. An upgrade’s Product Key cannot be used with a full version CD, and vice versa. An OEM Product Key will not work to install a retail product. An Italian Product Key will not work with an English CD.
Bottom line: Product Keys and CD types cannot be mixed & matched.

If it was a retail license and you have proof of purchase:

How to Replace Lost, Broken, or Missing Microsoft Software or Hardware
http://support.microsoft.com/default…B;en-us;326246

If it was an OEM license, you should contact the computer’s manufacturer.

Bruce Chambers

How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install
Author: Michael Stevens

http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

When you activate Windows XP, Microsoft stores the data in the Windows Product Activation database files wpa.dbl and Wpa.bak in the folder %systemroot%\system32. If you change the motherboard or make significant hardware changes, XP will require you to reactive. But if you plan to reinstall XP on the same hardware, you can back up the activation status and then restore it after you reinstall and avoid the activation process. You can backup the Windows Product Activation database files to diskette. They are very small. A directory listing from my XP Pro workstation:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>dir wp*
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 8447-0571

 Directory of C:\WINDOWS\system32

10/24/2001  08:28 PM            12,584 wpa.bak
01/14/2002  09:05 AM            12,642 wpa.dbl

After you reinstall XP, to restore the Windows Product Activation database files:

• Start XP to Minimal Safe mode
• Change directory to the \%systemroot%\system32 folder
• Rename the newly created wpa.dbl to wpa.nonactivated and wpa.bak, if it exists, to wpabak.nonactivated.
• Copy your backed up wpa.dbl and wpb.bak files to the system32 folder
• Reboot

This should work if you want to avoid activating XP after a reinstall or restore on the same or very similar hardware. It will not work if the hardware is significantly different from that in place when the Windows Product Activation database files were created. This is not a hack to avoid activating installations.

Those smaller companies use a generic OEM CD so as long as it is a Microsoft CD and not a branded one you should be OK.

One thing you need to watch out for is that you have the correct OEM CD version to go with that key. Right now if someone gives you a CD that has SP2c included your key will most likely not work. Original OEM, Sp1 and SP1a keys will all work with the same media, SP2 will only work with SP2 media, and SP2c will only work with SP2c keys.

Now the question is how the heck do you know if your keycode on the bottom of that laptop is SP1, 1a, 2 or 2c. . If it is rectangular, shiny, and has a blue border with white center and the holograms say “Microsoft GENUINE” at an angle it is most likely SP1 or 1a. If it is an odd bubble shape that is blue, yellow and green and the keycode is on the bottom and the bar codes are on the left and right then you have SP2.

Moral of the story: build up your collection of CDs of as many different versions of OEM and windows versions as you can for use in the future. LABEL them as to what they exactly can do.

This is perfectly legal, and free when users are throwing out their old PCs along with the now increasingly valuable disks (often still in their original shrink-wrap

Who said hoarding was a problem

It’s good to understand the basics.

Drivers for the SATA type drive must be loaded in addition to the standard set provided by XP install disks.. see for example this good post on how to chkdsk a troublesome sata drive: http://www.windowskb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/windows-xp-support/99602/Running-CHKDSK-on-a-SATA-Harddrive.

The other little conundrum is when a cloning an IDE to a new bigger better faster SATA drive, all goes well until the system is rebooted. Assuming you remember to set the bios boot options to chose the sata disk, then you’d think all would be well.
But if you leave the old ide source disk connected, then Windows in its wisdom enumerates the original partitions drive on the old drive from C, resulting in the new operating system on the sata drive with a drive letter other then C – sometimes way down the alphabet (if there are partitions more or usb media card readers) .

I don’t know about you, but I found it unnerving to have windows on the J drive!

Granted it may actually work, but why mess with things you don’t gotta mess with? (Especially on a customer’s system where you cannot possibly test all the programs)?!

The trick is to UNplug the old ide drive the first time you boot the system after cloning. AND you need to delete the partitions or format the old drive as well before plugging it back in.

Reading here shows others have found this out too: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Misc/Q_21664352.html?sfQueryTermInfo=1+10+30+drive+id+letter+sata+xp
Summary after cloning, remove the source disk, or else windows will see two identical volume identifiers and assume something is wrong..
So the moral of the story is: (a) clone the drive; (b) switch the drives or remove the source; and (c) THEN reboot. Delete the partition on the source using another PC (or with the destination disk removed). Then put the source back and the now clean original disk which will come up missing but can be added in again using the disk manager. This works even from IDE to SATA (where you want to put the old small IDE disk back in as a backup drive and use the new, fast SATA to boot and work from most of the time).

Another example
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Misc/Q_21281623.html?sfQueryTermInfo=1+10+30+drive+id+letter+sata+xp

Oh, and one other useful post I found summarises as:

Have a I mentioned how much I like the migwiz? Easier to type than “Windows Easy Transfer”

Just make sure the Old Computer has email in OE, Outlook or similar first. (Export it to that if need be). Getting it in in any other format is doable, but tricky.

But if you don’t use OE

Here’s how to get out of Thunderbird and into WLM (Windows Live Mail – and presumably Window Mail for those poor Vista straglers).

On the OPC (Old Computer), install and run the quaint little program. (gotta look it up again..) Watch out – it appears to fail on first run, but succeeds after a few tries. Found the HowTo here. The process is an export to .eml files using Tbird2OE and then import into Mail using OEImportEml. Both need to be installed. The import failed for me as I think there were some dodgy and/or large email files, so I manually dragged the files by folder (as described below) ..

Then copy all the resulting folders and files across to the NPC. (New PC)

Create the same folder structure in WLM. Select all the .eml files and drag and drop into the respective folders, (or just lump everything into the Inbox and forget about folders – who needs ‘em?!

It might pay to use a dos batch file to move all the .eml files into one folder (eliminating the folder structure altogether) if you are not going to use folders in Mail.

Hang on, you can’t do that as the .eml files are named 0000001.eml, 00000002.eml .. in each folder. You could rename them in the batch file  I suppose – didn’t try that.

(Don’t worry, they translate OK back to meaningful subjects, to and from etc as they were originally).

I have to say that this is one case where drag n’ drop really does work.  (In fact I’m not sure there is another way to get the files into Mail)! Import is available on the file menu, but specifying the source each time would be a pain.

A interesting “by the way”

From a second hand PC, I have seen it pull in the complete email profile from the former owner! The current owner had no idea that info was on there – and I bet the former owner would not have been pleased either…

Another FYI, use the Win7 version of migwiz (copy it onto a  usb stick and run from there on the OPC) Don’t use XP’s version.

Hallelujah – all praise be to win7 (and free apps that really work)

Being too clever by half, I partitioned a 160GB drive into a 40GB C drive so that I could have two more 60GB partitions.

Long story short  – this is NOT enough space for Win7 Pro. (Not sure what all is taken up by all those giga flops!??!)

The good news is that there is an easy fix.

Disks can be resized, but using Windows 7’s disk manager, only onto contiguous space (free space adjacent to the partition you want to change).

To resize non contiguous partions, I found a neat little gui that allow you to move (by sliding) any drive in the way across to the right a bit. A reboot and not-too-long nervous wait completed the process.

Found here: http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-67251-how-to-merge-windows-partition-to-increase-c

and the program is  Easeus Partition Master Home Edition here (http://download.cnet.com)

Hallelujah – all praise be to win7 (and free apps that really work)

• The number of words and thus the completeness of your query
• The subject matter involved (technical IT problems make it easier than other less esoteric endeavours I would guess)

but most important

• A little skill and experience in interpreting the results.

For example, pretty much anything on Fixya leads to just more unanswered questions (although I have found a few good answers here).
Technica leads to promising content but is pay as you go – so rules itself out immediately.
Anything at petri.co.il is sure to be detailed yet succinct, correct and not out of date. (Not sure how they manage this).
Vendor-specific queries are often but not always held on the company’s own or allied forum/s (I often forget this avenue). And even instant chat is now offered if you look around for it. To my mind this is the best resource of all, as you have near real time, free, opinion in back and white from a rep of the company.

Tek-tips.com has always been good and Tom’s hardware guide has always been reliable, if a little narrow in scope
Dani’s web, always sounds a bit scary to visit – but is usually good. Howtogeek is getting good too.
If none of these resources hit the mark, I narrow down the search by including site:experts-exchange.com.
Despite appearances the answers are mostly free to view – you just have to scroll down a bit (a lot
But for researching (read “reading around”) a topic, the best choice is to choose the “Discussions” filter down the left column. This means you don’t have to do the filtering mentally to chuck out the chaff.

Last but not least, the vendor’s own or allied forum site located off their support link, is a great place to start. Often an Instant Chat can be initiated – which in my opinion, is the greatest step forward in the Internet age of recent times. It gives you near real time, free, company opinion on the topic in question – and the bonus is you have it in black and white if there are any future come backs. And you don’t have to wrangle with accents over a low quality echoey phoneline to Outer Siberia (or other cheap labour location).

PS Did anyone mention Microsoft’s site at all? (No need as it rarely comes high up, and if so, you know to skip those links anyway Inevitably, if you do choose a MS  page, it will confirm the problem, and helpfully let you know that the latest Service Pack has resolved that issue. Or you find it has a solution only for different versions of Windows than the one you need. Either that, or step you through a dozen pointless t do’s, with no contingency should it not go perfectly according to their plan (grrr) Oh, and you’ll need some admin tool off the cd you long ago confined to the bin, and will have to go to a third party to get again. And then learn the syntax to. Rant off.

Submit your best resource sites that give you the answers you’re after.

Well I have OO 3.0 now which is not even the latest version and it was just too easy.

The earlier versions of OO could not rotate stuff on the page which is the something that I often want to do in promotional material. No problem for OO draw now.

I also used to get frustrated with scaling stuff. It would be very jittery and snap to odd positions.

The point I am trying to make is that if you have tried OO and didnt like it maybe its time to give it another go.

“it shouldn’t be that hard”.

In other words technology should “just work”.  (Unfortunately we all know this is not entirely true all the time.)

Yet I try to live by that mantra, and not get sucked in by the “complicated fix”. But over the last three days, I have been doing battle with routers – or more specifically one router in particular. A Cisco WAG310G.  I installed successfully as the end point for a VOIP solution.  [That part went very well, by the way and WAS simple].

However, in trying to get a VPN to work through the new router, I’d forgotten to apply the check the simple things first…  (no, not “is the damn thing plugged in?”,) but, “did you read the spec of the machine to see it can do what you are asking it to do?”. The answer is “no”.

In my defence, the fact that the router had the GRE47 protocol as  a service that could be chosen for pass-through, would have indicated ( I would have thought) that the router was capable of VPN.

I mean, is not a VPN a simple, basic requirement of all modern routers?

One would have thought so.

To confound matters, I was also blinded by the oft and varied reports of Win7 and the troubles of getting a VPN to work with that new beast. The old, stable XP-based VPN was still working fine – even with the new router installed. (But actually it, too had stopped and I hadn’t noticed).  grrr

On the support site for this router – there is a prominent link on How to setup a VPN.

http://www.linksysbycisco.com/ANZ/en/support/WAG310G

A much more helpful article has screengrabs that show the missing VPN tab in the security settings of the router’s gui:

http://linksys.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/linksys.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=4239

and if you are “encountering difficulties” try:

Encountering Difficulties Connecting to the VPN Tunnel Using a ADSL Gateway

not that this will help if you don’t RTFM !

I needed to share a printer off Win7Pro to an XP Home machine. Despite all the best efforts going both the old-fashioned way [create identical userid and password on both machines], and the new way every says it’s done: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/share-files-and-printers-between-windows-7-and-xp/.

No cigar. I still got prompted for the userid and password after each restart. (As reported by lots of other posters.)

However, it occurred to me that by mapping a shared folder using a simple net use batch file, the user id and password if valid for the share, would eliminate the need for it again when reconnecting to the printer share.
Voila.
It worked.
net use z: \\win7pcname\foldershare /user:win7pcname\username passwordhere

Now put THAT in your pipe and smoke it win7 !

A big concern for any business is that the phones keep working and it has taken us this long testing the XNET VOIP offering to get to a stage were we trust it enough to recommend it to our customers. We have now signed a reseller agreement with XNET and will be offering their services to our clients.

The first thing that attracted us to a VOIP system was not the cost, which is what attracts most people, but the flexibility of the system. Once voice data has been turned into IP data it makes it a lot easier to manage. We have the most basic XNET package but with that we get features of a PABX which 10 years ago would have cost thousands.

PABX’s also become a lot simpler. Standard computer hardware can now be used to route voice traffic within your business, voice menus, Automated call systems, recording phone conversations and a whole lot more. At a fraction of the cost of traditional systems.

If you are interested in giving a VOIP system a go give us a call.

However, one can do a LOT of reading around a subject without getting to the nitty gritty of what to do.

This is one of those rare occasions, however, when I found a how-to summary that succinctly described what to do, without too much technical detail, but with enough of what you need to know to get it working.

Rather than rewrite Larry’s words, I will quote his post in full here

http://forums.techarena.in/small-business-server/955926.htm

Oh – and to answer the question of browsing – simply map a drive on the client machine to \\ip.address.of.server\share using the domain authentication.

Easy.

24-04-2008

Larry Struckmeyer Posts: n/a

Re: VPN Connects but unable to browse Network HELP!! Hi: In general, I recommend RWW over VPN for connecting remotely. If you have a particular issue that requires a VPN connection, I would appreciate if you would share. To use VPN with your SBS you must first run the CEICW and permit that service to be used. Then run the RRAS wizard to setup the WAN ports. These are the second and third wizards on the To Do List in Server Management. You must have a router/firewall that has port 1723 forwarded to your SBS and that allows GRE 47 to pass. Some older devices do not allow this. And theother hardware related issue is that the SBS ip ranges and the remote ip range must be different. That is, if SBS is 192.168.16.x internal, and 192.168.100.x external, the remote cannot have the same numbers in the first three octets. Are there any specific errors in your event logs, or specific messages that occur And as always, I recommend the SBS BPA. Run that and do what it recommends. http://www.sbsbpa.com/ – Larry Please post the resolution to your issue so that all can benefit.

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