Yet another Win7 Issue !!!

A few weeks back you may recall I had issues when I exchanged hard disks between two pretty well identical legally licenced Win7 machines as a diagnostic aid. (Compaq / HP SFF DC7600's) They then reported illegal operating systems. That was sorted by reverting them to whence they came. However I have a third Win 7 machine that recently flashed up a message that the copy of Win7 wasn't legal and to follow a link. That took me to a Microsoft page that emblazoned across the top told me that as my software WAS legitimate, I was entitled to buy certain upgrades !!!!!!!

Now all these three machines are running Win7 loaded from the same disk and having the same licence number that has been verified by Microsoft as being legal. With Win7 professional you can use it on three machines.

I can sort of understand that if my licence number had been thought odd when I swapped the hdds in the first two, then just maybe the third machine flagged up as it had the same number. But the cynic in my says that actually this is just crude advertising to sell more product. Anyone else had this? All three machines are now running fine and do regular 'update' checks.

Differences in hardware configuration and identifications causing check-sum differences invalidating the licence

One of the recent updates caused grief with certificates, and in turn with the activation checks, they hurriedly sent out another update to kill the dodgy update, but not before it had affected some machines ...

If you have KBKB3024777 installed you should be OK, and the cause is something else, if not, you may need to remove KB3004394.

KB3024777 was installed on 13th December, before the issue. There is no issue now, it was just I thought linking to a page flogging updates was blatant advertising

Andrew

Nthkentman, you've not read the full post have you !

Andrew

You are of course right. I have a win 7 home premium machine and when I go onto the site manually with it it tries the hard sell for windows 8.1 and Office 365 at discount rates. OK so the rates are good, but I don't want to change what works do I? I mean, why would anyone just change for the sake of it? Brian

Yes I had a fleeting glimpse of "this license is not legitimate" (or similar) in the last month or so on a known good Win7 machine. Only saw it once and didn't follow any links - not seen it since - just assumed it was either fishing or Windows having a bad day.