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Faded windows key

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  • Jamesdeer001
    Jamesdeer001 Posts: 241 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 100 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    I believe it originally came with 1gb 6 years ago and I upgraded to 4gb a few years ago. I did then have a SSD installed in it but it failed after 15 months, amazon refunded, and then I bought a chromebook with the refund.
    Have used the chromebook for last 15 months and it does 99% of what I need with the only failure being anything to do with silverlight so that I can't watch good quality reliable sport on the chrome browser :( (I don't know of good quality, reliable websites either).
    I have sky go but can't use it as chromebook isn't supported. Virgin's equivalent doesn't work either and neither does BT sport so my idea was to resurrect my old laptop, purely to watch these things.
    I haven't bought the new SSD yet so I might just reinstall windows on the exisiting HD, and just install things to make the above 3 sports packages work. Should keep the system in a clean state
  • AndyPix
    AndyPix Posts: 4,847 Forumite
    Fifth Anniversary 1,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    You don't need the product key(faded or otherwise) for Royalty OEM.
    As to generated keys....also quite unnecessary and you use them at your own risk.

    Who mentioned generated keys ?
  • NiftyDigits
    NiftyDigits Posts: 10,459 Forumite
    I did.........
  • Nilrem
    Nilrem Posts: 2,565 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts
    One possibility with faded key stickers is to take a few pictures with a half decent camera, load them up into some image software (irfanview, paintshop etc) and fiddle with the contrast settings for the picture.

    Sometimes you can improve it enough to make out the key.

    I've had to do it a few times with friends machines, quite why it was ever thought a good idea to put the windows key stickers on the bottom of laptops where they'll typically get rubbed a lot in normal use I don't know (I think some later Dell's started putting them in the battery bay).
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