Windows XP Activation and P2V

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At the office, I'm gradually converting a ton of legacy PC's to virtual machines. The quick & easy way is to run ntbackup on the old box, bring up a vanilla virtual machine, and restore it onto that. NTbackup is also great when, months from now, someone says oops..I need n.

The P2V assisitant, and VMWare's Knoppix distro , is also incredibly good.

Sometimes, however, even when the P2V process is flawless, Windows still wants to sh!t a bit. Twice now, I've converted Dell laptops to virtual machines, and had Windows Product Activation rear it's ugly head. we have a volume licensing agreement, but for some ungodly reason, these machines were deployed (before I was here) with the image that came from Dell. With all the crapware that they include. And low and behold, following the ntbackup restore and reboot, Windows XP wants you to reactivate.

No thanks.

I boot from the Ultimate P2V ISO, just because I love it, and you can customize it with a ton of great tools. These files need to be replaced, with those from a volume-licensing edition of Windows XP, (which, of course, you need to own licenses for, blah blah blah):
  • dpcdll.dll
  • oembios.bin
  • oembios.dat
  • oembios.sig
  • pidgen.dll

...and then the P2V will truly be gold, and Windows Product Activation will piss off. Honestly, they really need to re-examine their Orwellian activation attributes.

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