HELP! Activation Questions?

[Iovah]

I have had a computer for a year with XP Home installed and all of a sudden I started it up a few days ago and it came to the desktop but with no icons or taskbar. Windows asked if I wanted to activate the product as if it never had been activated I choose yes and then it just logs off. I choose no and it just logs off. It will not let me go to the last good configuration or safemode in any form. What gives has something been corruppted ?

 

[fecht]

try booting from the cdrom and do a restore

 

[Iovah]

I tryed to repair it and it asked for the administrators password. it's my grandfather's computer and my uncle thinks he's a computer guru or a guru at everything for that matter. anyways I don't know the admin password, is there a default one? if so maybe it's still the default I really don't want to have to reinstall. Restore or repair yes. Is restoring different then repairing?

 

[rbV5]

is there a default one?

blank?

 

[Iovah]

administrator password lol I hope you aren't clowning on me

 

[rbV5]

administrator password lol I hope you aren't clowning on me

Default is blank, whoever installed it would have had to type something in there. Alot of folks simply click through that part, so if they did, you'd be in luck. I'm not sure it would help anyway. Sounds like someone ignored the activation pop-ups until it was too late, you may be stuck reinstalling (I dunno though). I'm not so sure you can recover from a timed out installation.

 

[Iovah]

see that's the thing I installed it I didn't put a password in I just clicked therefor no password also I activated this product a year ago and it hasn't needed to be activated unless somehow the registry key in the registry was corrupted somehow?

 

[rbV5]

Did you install a network adaptor or other component that would have triggered a re-activation? It wont accept no password when it asks for one? Are you repairing the installation in the console or through setup?

 

[Iovah]

THrough setup