Cheapest legal way to provide XP reinstalls for customers

[mrapoc]

Hey guys

I wish it were as simple as 1 XP disk (home or pro) will work with any serial but alas there are seperate OEMs such as Dell and such which wont work with a standard XP disk.

So basically, if customers already have an xp serial, but its for say, Acer or Dell, and do not have the provided disk, yet a valid license, other than getting a copy of each OEM's disk for my use (changing the serial each time) is there another way?

Customers will obviously not want to buy a totally new OEM license so what are my options?

[Simon]

I have to admit, I've never come across that, Sam.  I thought that an XP licence is an XP licence.  I have certainly reinstalled XP on a Dell machine, having first wiped the drive, using the original serial, with a 'normal' XP SP2 CD.

[Sebby]

I've come across this problem before, and I have just "obtained" the correct disc. I don't see a problem in doing this as I have a legal license key.

[mrapoc]

So pretty much I either have to

a) get hold of the company and request an XP cd, blagging that I have lost my own
b) charge the customer for another XP license
c) resort to measures that is somewhat dodgy =/

[Sebby]

Yep.

[mrapoc]

Some interesting solutions made across at oc3d

http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?p=346571#post346571

Time to start trying them out xD

[Rik]

Have fun, Sam.

[Sebby]

Ah yes, forgot about that method. I have done that a few times, but you can't always find the i386 folder.

[mrapoc]

suppose i just need to stumble across one working PC for each vendor and get ahold of a backup.

Then I can reuse that as much as i want

I dont trust getting an OS off a file sharing site, who knows what has been bundled within such a critical part of a system

[Supanova]

I suspect I'm teaching you to suck eggs, but you do know there are small programs that will retrieve a windows cd-key from the registry for you. There are loads of them via google. Obviously the OS needs to be functioning at the time for this to be possible.

Also I dunno how useful this article is: http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/windows-xp-product-key-recovery/

EDIT: After re-reading your original post I'v realised I misunderstood the problem. You can probably download the specific DELL or whatever OEM disk and retrieve the original xp-cdkey from the computer using the method above. This ain't illegal afaik as you are still using their authentication key. I'm a rapidshare user so I would use one of these links.