"Fare" Warning: MS License Enforcement

[Railroad]

I recently bought a new laptop, which came with a 60-day evaluation copy of MS Office student/teacher edition, which I promptly uninstalled. I then installed MS Office 2003 Pro; I used the same CD I bought for installation on my tower PC. Of course I have it installed on my PC as well.

About a week later (this morning), I was working away using my PC, when it suddenly locked up. I had to reboot, and when the machine came back up, I went to get a help file for MS Project off a CD and the CD drive wasn't working. Likewise for the other CD drive. Now the PC sees neither of the CD drives.

I went to bring up MS Word and got the "you must activate your software" message. Proceeded with activation and was told I'd exceeded the number of allowable installations for this license, and that I should contact Microsoft (after reading the EULA).

Currently my PC has no CD capability and I'm afraid to shut anything down for fear I'll lose that, too. Next step is to get in touch with Microsoft, with credit card in hand. Hence, "Fare" warning.

 

[Kain99]

Check your fan!!!!

 

[desertrat]

I recently bought a new laptop, which came with a 60-day evaluation copy of MS Office student/teacher edition, which I promptly uninstalled. I then installed MS Office 2003 Pro; I used the same CD I bought for installation on my tower PC. Of course I have it installed on my PC as well.

About a week later (this morning), I was working away using my PC, when it suddenly locked up. I had to reboot, and when the machine came back up, I went to get a help file for MS Project off a CD and the CD drive wasn't working. Likewise for the other CD drive. Now the PC sees neither of the CD drives.

I went to bring up MS Word and got the "you must activate your software" message. Proceeded with activation and was told I'd exceeded the number of allowable installations for this license, and that I should contact Microsoft (after reading the EULA).

Currently my PC has no CD capability and I'm afraid to shut anything down for fear I'll lose that, too. Next step is to get in touch with Microsoft, with credit card in hand. Hence, "Fare" warning.

Yeah, I bought one a couple weeks ago and was wondering what would happen. I have Ms works for another computer and was wondering about installing (trying) that, but don't know what would happen with two copies on disk. I guess I'll just wait until it runs out. It'd incredible that it would disable your hard drives though. Isn't that extortion?

 

[Railroad]

Update: Turns out that this was because even though I'd uninstalled Office Pro from an older laptop before putting it on this one, it still looked to Microsoft (of course, how can you tell them?) that it was installed on both the old and the new laptop. The license is good for one desktop and one laptop only. So with that squared away, they gave me a lengthy number code that fixed the MS Office apps, but the CD Roms are still dead.


I'm on hold with tech support right now.

 

[Railroad]

Last update: After an hour playing around with the Device Manager and the Windows Registry to no avail, the lady at Microsoft's Bombay, India help desk told me to open up my computer and unplug the CD ROM drives, then plug them back in again. It worked!

She said it was static electricity; quite a coincidence that the static electricity struck at the same time as the activation/licensing bullet.

HOWEVER, now the computer has detected two unknown devices, a bus controller and something else, that it hadn't detected before. Since all my stuff's working now, I don't care and will let the unknown devices remain unknown.

 

[desertrat]

Last update: After an hour playing around with the Device Manager and the Windows Registry to no avail, the lady at Microsoft's Bombay, India help desk told me to open up my computer and unplug the CD ROM drives, then plug them back in again. It worked!

She said it was static electricity; quite a coincidence that the static electricity struck at the same time as the activation/licensing bullet.

HOWEVER, now the computer has detected two unknown devices, a bus controller and something else, that it hadn't detected before. Since all my stuff's working now, I don't care and will let the unknown devices remain unknown.

Could it be talking about the drives?

 

[Railroad]

Could it be talking about the drives?

Nope, these are in addition to the drives. I suspect it's an issue with the Windows XP Upgrade version and the way it (doesn't) work and play with the motherboard. But since everything is working very well indeed, I'll let the question marks remain in the device manager window and get on with life....and work.