IBBoard

I'm trying to be legitimate, and all it does is causes me problems.

I got my laptop (an Acer) about four years ago. It came with XP Home and one of those annoying restore disks that'll trash everything and reset partitions and things. About a year later, I removed XP and installed Redhat Linux. Some time between then and now I replaced the 10GB disk with a 40GB disk.

Now I'm trying to reinstall XP as a dual-boot (hopefully keeping my Linux install intact) but it doesn't want to activate. Installation wouldn't recognise my CD key, so I used a pirated one to get past it. Now I'm at activation, I've put my actual CD key in and it is still rejecting it. I contacted the MS activation phone line to see if that would help, but all they said is go to Acer.

All I'm trying to do is reinstall Windows using a legitimate license that isn't even installed on any other machines, and all it'll do is get in my way :\ There's got to be a way to get the stupid thing to work, because the worst part is that it hasn't even given me my 30 days without activation.

Hey ho, if I finally get it working then it might eventually be worth it to be able to download WGA-secured items like the DirectX SDK and to be able to work in Visual Studio while my fiancee plays Sims2 on my desktop machine...Oh, to have the simple life!