• Lost Windows 7 key after forced Win10 upgrade

    Posted on January 21, 2017 at 11:28 CST by • Comment in the Forums

    Interesting question from KP:

    First of all, thanks for your Web site, it is my go-to site for all the latest Microsoft update shenanigans. My 80 year old father bought a HP PC from a guy who buys PC’s by the pallet from companies that are doing mass PC upgrades. This would be sometime in late 2015. It had been originally purchased with XP (XP OEM sticker on case) but had been upgraded to Win7 by the company prior to them replacing them.

    After about a year of perfect performance, my dad started getting the GWX message. I had not had the opportunity to load the GWX control panel tool. Long story short, He has a habit of leaving his PC running 24×7 and one morning he went into his office and winX had been installed on his machine. He was able to carefully navigate to the part of the screen where he could remove the winX and restore his Win7 OS. He told me later that the process took several hours to reinstall Win7. After the process, he had Win7 back but started getting the dreaded “this is not an official version of Windows 7” message. I used Belarc to try and recover a key that may be on his machine but all I get is an xxx-OEM-xxx key. When trying to reactivate, I used the same key shown by Belarc and still get the same “not official” key.

    This PC was running Win7 flawlessly for a year prior to the WinX upgrade attempt. Do you have any thoughts/advice on how we can straighten this out?

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