I am an employee at a college in IT. We recently purchased 500 tablet PC's (HP 2730p). All of the tablet's came pre-installed with Windows Vista Business OEM from HP. We image using Norton Ghost Suite so we took one tablet and set it up.
We decided that HP had put too much bloatware on the machine so we went back and formatted the drive, removed all the other partitions and install Windows Vista Business from a DVD back onto the machine and installed all the appropriate drivers. We pushed this image out to about 50 machines and tried to activate them.
Since this image has a different product key (from the DVD) we were going in and changing the product key to the OEM key on the bottom of the laptop. However, the computer does not activate with the keys that we put in from the bottom, which Microsoft has disabled and we must go through the automated phone thing which is a bust (doing it 500+ times) and actually talk to a representative who gives a confirmation ID back and it activates fine.
I read online that you can preserve the OEM activation from the factory and do a fresh install (like we did for the image) on that machine and copy back the OEM activation and it would work fine. So I saved an OEM activation of a tablet out of the box and went to one our the imaged tablets and did a activation restore of the OEM activation. The tablet took it and I even went online to Microsoft website and it validated.
My question is can I take this tablet that has been imaged with fresh install and take the OEM activation copied to it and in return, copy this machine to the remaining tablets? This would mean all the tablets would be activated and would retain their OEM activation from HP's factory. Is this plausible or am I missing something?
We've looked at KMS but we lease these tablet computers to students that they can purchase at the end of the lease (2 or 4-years) and we can't have them come in every 180 days to have their computer activated with KMS.
Any other thoughts or ideas?
We decided that HP had put too much bloatware on the machine so we went back and formatted the drive, removed all the other partitions and install Windows Vista Business from a DVD back onto the machine and installed all the appropriate drivers. We pushed this image out to about 50 machines and tried to activate them.
Since this image has a different product key (from the DVD) we were going in and changing the product key to the OEM key on the bottom of the laptop. However, the computer does not activate with the keys that we put in from the bottom, which Microsoft has disabled and we must go through the automated phone thing which is a bust (doing it 500+ times) and actually talk to a representative who gives a confirmation ID back and it activates fine.
I read online that you can preserve the OEM activation from the factory and do a fresh install (like we did for the image) on that machine and copy back the OEM activation and it would work fine. So I saved an OEM activation of a tablet out of the box and went to one our the imaged tablets and did a activation restore of the OEM activation. The tablet took it and I even went online to Microsoft website and it validated.
My question is can I take this tablet that has been imaged with fresh install and take the OEM activation copied to it and in return, copy this machine to the remaining tablets? This would mean all the tablets would be activated and would retain their OEM activation from HP's factory. Is this plausible or am I missing something?
We've looked at KMS but we lease these tablet computers to students that they can purchase at the end of the lease (2 or 4-years) and we can't have them come in every 180 days to have their computer activated with KMS.
Any other thoughts or ideas?