Crimson Tibbasim wrote on 2021-05-29, 00:59:

Some retailers had activator scripts in their recovery partitions. Last time I could remember seeing one for a Dell laptop some years ago. I'm not sure if they exist somewhere on the internet and if so... it's possible for someone to try one on a non-retail version of windows Xp. Not sure if it'll work!

I would guess those scripts did nothing more than simply copy into the Windows directory the required certificates to allow Windows to enabled its OEM pre-activated state through SLP (in conjunction with SLIC OEM info in the BIOS).

Most if not all machines from large OEMs such as Dell did not require online (Internet) activation.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Locked … re-installation

The old link is obsolete - please find here an updated link for the "GoInteract Self Service for Mobile website" - thats the online-version of the phoneactivation for old MS-Software (XP, Office etc.):
https://microsoft.gointeract.io/interact/inde … =1&token=UEuUbt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9xfQNAHsJE

This method works. I've had to do it twice in the last month. Once to activate a fresh install, but then I changed hardware and re-installed, so the activation key from the first time didn't work, probably b/c it detected a hardware change. So I did it again and it activated just fine the second time.

A bit cumbersome but it does work.