First off, the key is genuine I am not asking how to crack windows or anything like that.
Now the problem is that I have had to reinstall windows on my nephews Sony laptop after putting in a new hdd, he didn't have a recovery partition obviously, nor has he got the windows cd that came with it.
I thought this would be no problem, it has the key sticker on it, and I have reinstalled windows a few times like this and had no real problems, so I popped in my windows disc, and formatted and installed it.
The disc didn't accept the key as valid, I have had this problem before, so a trip to google sorted that problem and it installed and is running nicely.
However on previous occasions I have hooked them upto the internet and gone to the activation program and changed the key to the one that is on the sticker, but this key isn't being accepted, now I know with 5 mins work I can get this laptop running without wga/activation, but it has a legitimate key, and I am pretty sure that my nephew would like to be able to get updates, which using the current key isn't going to happen, so is there anything I can do about this? Perhaps edit the registry with the legit key and then activate?