Leolo wrote:

.....
What this means, for us, is that you can buy a machine with the cheapest Windows 7 edition, format the hard disk, and afterwards you can grab yourself a DVD of Windows 7 Ultimate to install it.

Then you just have to install the digital certificate issued to your manufacturer (they are very easy to find on the forums) and .. voila! your Windows 7 Ultimate edition will pass the authentication and validation procedures with flying colors......

Strange...

I know that royalty oem XP install media are indeed different. You can install such an XP on any non-royalty oem machine but it won't activate and MS won't activate it when you try the phone method.
Installing a standard XP on a royalty oem motherboard will behave exactly like any other motherboard:It will still ask you to enter a key and activate it (unless you're using a corporate version of pro ofcourse).
I also once got hold of an old Fujitsu-Siemens P3 motherboard which had a licence for 2k. I installed a FS XP Home on it and it worked (that motherboard was sold with a system that let you pick wether you wanted 2k or XP btw).

Anyway, for your windows 7 trick, you'll still need a Royalty oem motherboard?

What oem's are using now is similar to the corporate editions of xp really. A corp edition is a version that uses something similar to what is now known as mak serials, and is preactivated during setup.
These days there are more licensing types than in xp though.
Now you have mak (multiple activation key) licenses, ours at work have 500 activations per key.
Then you have kms licenses, where a server on your lan will activate the license for you. These are primarily used in conjunction with wds/sccm/ghost and similar systems, so the windows 'just works' when it's installed without a serial at all.
And there's your normal license for home users, and the oem license which you say is bound to the bios (just like in the old days, where the oem licenses worked only with specific vendor ids)

Tetrium, yes, you need a Royalty OEM motherboard for this trick to work.

However, there are some tools out there that can modify the BIOS of almost any mainboard in the market (be it Award, Phoenix or AMI) and can insert the digital certificate of your choice into your BIOS. Be warned, there's some risk involved, because you could render your mainboard unbootable if something goes wrong.

The Royalty OEM motherboards don't have that problem, because their BIOS already include the digital certificate, and there is absolutely no risk for the end user.

In those cases you just have to download a small file (an .XRM-MS file corresponding to the manufacturer of your PC) and install it using a specific Microsoft tool included in Windows.

I can confirm that the method does work, because I upgraded an HP laptop that came with Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate and could validate it without any problems.

I even double-checked it through this site:

http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/

And it passed all the tests. It really does work. The only "difficulty" is to find the small .XRM-MS file and a DVD of Windows 7 Ultimate.

Thanks! Very informative! Now I got 1 or 2 more things on my already stretched to-do list 😁

I think it's fun trying things out like this. I did a lot of work regarding this with XP mostly

There are other places to talk about this. VOGONS is not one of those places.

DosFreak wrote:

There are other places to talk about this. VOGONS is not one of those places.

Explains why the thread has five pages ....

Are you trying to hint at something?

The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of corssing my mind.

corssing my mind

Couldn't describe it any better.

Ok, sorry. Yes, this conversation could easily turn into a "warez" issue and this isn't the forum for that.

If anyone is interested in this, there's a forum called mydigitallife where the authors of those tools usually post. Bue please be careful with those tools, you could easily make your PC unbootable!

Cheers.