Vista no more!

[forgotten_aria]

We installed XP, but because the hardware hash didn't match the key, it wouldn't verify, so we phoned them, explained that we wanted to down grade from Vista to XP and they took pity on us and gave us a verifcation code.

And I just want to say "Location, location, bees!"

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[ghudson.livejournal.com]

The gory details, for the curious: we got a machine from Dell, which came with Vista since Dell did not appear to be offering XP at the time. It's a pretty low-end machine, and while it has plenty of mojo to run World of Warcraft (the machine's primary job for the moment) under XP, it didn't play it satisfactorily under Vista--the game seemed to be memory-starved, and also had a jerking issue where it would lose frames every second or so despite having an overall reasonable frame rate. Eliminating all the Dell OEM crap on the machine didn't seem to help any.

Soo, we want XP on the machine. The materials we have on hand are: a retail CD of XP Home Edition from a machine I put together from parts, an OEM XP key from a mostly broken laptop we don't use any more, and of course the OEM Vista key from the new machine. (And a retail XP key from the install CD we're using, but we're still using Windows XP on the machine I put together from parts, so I didn't want to type in that key.)

Not surprisingly, neither the laptop's OEM XP key nor the new machine's OEM Vista key would verify on the XP Home Edition retail CD; they don't match the product version. After angsting for a while, we decided to call Microsoft and see if they would take pity on us despite our not having a license which matched what we wanted to do. The phone droid with the faint Indian accent listened to my brief story and gave me the confirmation code without any pushback at all, and after that all seems well.