Windows 7 certificate of authenticity

Lum

With Dell and certain other major OEMs half of the licence is burned into the computer's BIOS in something called a "SLIC table" and the other half is in the form of digital certificates burned onto the Dell specially modified Windows 7 installation DVD. If you reinstall from the Dell DVD you will never be prompted for a key.

The key that is used internally when doing it this way is global across all Dell machines running the same version of Windows, so no need to worry about other people using it as mentioned in #8. If you do extract that key with Jellybean or whatever and attempt to install with a normal DVD it will not work as in addition to the key you need the SLIC from the BIOS and the digital certificates from the Dell Windows 7 DVD.

If you reinstall from a normal Win7 DVD, you will either need to locate the unique key sticker on your laptop or use some rather dubious 3rd party tools to load the digital certificates onto your system.

I hope I haven't gone into too much detail, but in short, keep that DVD safe, make a backup of it and keep that safe too, otherwise reinstalling Windows 7 will be a PITA.

free4440273

Some folk put more stickers on

scragend

If it's a Dell it's definitely going to be under the battery cover.

Nilrem

scragend wrote: »

If it's a Dell it's definitely going to be under the battery cover.

Aye, that fooled me last year when I bought one for my mother.

It's actually a very good place for the COA given how rarely it's needed, as putting it behind an easily accessible panel means it should remain legible for the life of the machine.

Unlike many COA's on laptops that reach a nearly unreadable state in relatively short order (I've resorted to playing with a camera and paintshop pro in the past to read a badly worn COA).

alanjuk

scragend wrote: »

If it's a Dell it's definitely going to be under the battery cover.

Guess what, it is! don't know why I didn't look there, many thanks

John_Gray

alanjuk wrote: »

Guess what, it is! don't know why I didn't look there, many thanks

If you hadn't previously heard that that's where they now put the COA sticker, you would have to have been psychic to know this!

wearside_2

santer wrote: »

Have you got the serial number for Windows? If not, speccy will tell you what it is as the serial number is essential if you need to re-install

http://filehippo.com/download_speccy/

Thank you for this useful post. I have downloaded Speccy and saved all the information in a word document on my PC. I have then uninstalled the product!

alexmole

new dell ones are under the battery