If you have ever had to setup a bunch of identical computers and used cloning to do it, then you’ve run into the problem of the window’s product key not matching the hardware it’s on. The same product key will appear on all of the machines and not match the COA (Certificate of Authenticity) product key sticker. The instructions on how to change the product key on each machine is located here on the Microsoft site. What they describe in method #1 is to change a single value in the registry in the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\Current Version\WPAEvents\OOBETimer, this has never worked for me. I tried it on multiple machines, changing a single digit in the key, changing multiple values in the key, changing everything to zeros, when I ran %systemroot%\system32\oobe\msoobe.exe /a in the command prompt to reactivate it, it always popped up a dialog saying windows was already activated. Now method #2, it offers two different scripts, ChangeVLKeySP1.vbs and ChangeVLKey2600.vbs. ChangeVLKeySP1.vbs gives me a script error so i gave up on that one. ChangeVLKey2600.vbs is the only method that has worked every time for me. You basically run the script c:\changevlkeysp1.vbs ab123-123ab-ab123-123ab-ab123 from the command prompt where ab123-123ab-ab123-123ab-ab123 is the product key on the COA. Upon rebooting, you will be asked to activate the product key and then you’re all good. Note: Make sure your network drivers are installed and working properly before you do this, that way when you reboot you will have an active internet connection to complete the activation. Now you’re asking, how do you verify the product key matches the COA. There is a great little utility by “The Magical Jelly Bean”, yes you read that right, the utility is free and it will display your product key to you to verify it was entered correctly. Just install the utility, run it, verify the product key, then un-install it.
