I had purchased a legitimate copy of Windows 7 Pro through the student offer with my student email address. I had to do a full clean install a couple of weeks ago and today it told me I MUST activate. Every time I tried, it said my key was for an upgrade and not the full version. I scoured the net and found this work around and thought I would share it with you.
You can give this easy guide a try. If it doesn’t work then head to the link at the end of this post and you will find the other two ways of doing this. But they didn’t work for me.
Here are the simple steps:
Clean Install and Activate Windows 7 with MediaBootInstall Registry Hack
- After booting up, ensure that no Windows Updates pending task which requires a system reboot to finish installing.
Tip: Normally, an orange-colored shield icon will be displayed next to Shutdown button in the Start Menu Power Button or at notification tray area if a restart is required.
If reboot is required, restart the computer to allow any pending updates is installed.
- Run Registry Editor (RegEdit).
- Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE
- In the right pane, change the value data for MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0.
- Open an elevated command prompt as administrator.
- Run the command below to reset Windows 7 activation status:
slmgr -rearm
- Reboot the computer.
- Run the Activate Windows utility (accessible from bottom section of Control Panel -> System and Security -> System, or type Activate Windows into Start Search), type in the upgrade product key and activate Windows.
Thanks goes to MyDigitalLife for their help.
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