We have had nonstop issues with the image for our Classmate this year. We have the classmate from 2009.
Originally, when we received our key at kickoff it was an E11 key (the wrong one), so we swapped it out for an E09 key from another team who needed an E11 key. When that key didn’t work, another team duplicated the E11 key to a new USB drive. This key worked fine insomuch as getting the computer up and running, however, the computer keeps on insisting that the copy of Windows is not Genuine.
This doesn’t stop our computer from functioning for the time being, but it should stop working in about another month (I think?) and I don’t want to be left in a situation without a driver’s station.
Every time that we boot up the computer, it gives a message requesting that we “Get Genuine Now!” and lets us either try to validate it online or wait until later. Earlier it would have us go through some kind of wizard (while still in a Windows Explorer window) before giving us an error (I never wrote it down, sorry). Now if we try to validate online, we get directed to an internet browser window that requests that we download something so that Windows can verify whether our computer is Genuine or not. After running this program it says that we need to purchase a new key to be Genuine. This costs around $200, which is money that our team can’t afford to spend unnecessarily.
Any help would be appreciated.
Easy, just follow the procedures regarding updating your classmate. You need to let it connect to the internet to finish validation…
That’s what we did. It gave us an error. We ignored it for a while, but now that I’m not handling multiple other things on the software front, this has gotten a high enough priority to be actively worried about.
So you imaged an E09 Classmate with an E11 image?
Or was that just mistyping?
The E09 Restoration stick will have the license file included unless it was corrupted in the stick copies/installation.
Check your activation code by right-clicking on *Start -> Computer *to get properties, scroll to the bottom where you can choose activate now and the windows license should be listed there. You can try activate now, too, I suppose.
The best I could suggest after that would be to reimage the Classmate (with an E09 stick) and try again.
Yeah, that was a typo. I meant to say that we had imaged with the E09 key.
I looked in the My Computer -> Properties dialog, and the product key that is displayed there has zeroes in it… which means that it’s not valid. (The key activator thing doesn’t accept zeroes or Os, I’d imagine to avoid any confusion between the two.)
I guess we’ll reimage it shortly, seeing as how we don’t have much of a choice at this point.
There is another option and that’s phone activation.
Some people have done that without any trouble.
Microsoft just produces an activation code for you to enter.