I learned alot yesterday, when re-installing Windows on the laptop.
My recovery cd’s are three. #2 decided it wouldn’t work (cyclic redundancy, lots of scratches that came from WHERE?) I used these very discs in the Summer of 2003 for the first time. They were in there packages since then. That’s the way it goes.
So did it make sense to scrounge for $29 plus change, and have SONY send me a new set of Recovery CD’s?
I decided, “No.”
We have a Win XP Home OEM CD. I installed that, and figured somehow in the next 30-days I would have to figure out how to keep it on the laptop (activate it).
Then I went through a million hoops trying to get SONY drivers to install.
I think that most of them worked best to install via Device Manager: Update Driver, and having it search the designated folder on the Sony driver CD.
I was on Vaio Village, an Easy board, posting under a relevant, to me, thread asking for help. I wanted the apps from the recovery CD’s, like WIN DVD mostly …
This is the place to go: http://www.myplc.com/sony/sony_apps.htm
Command line solution to unpacking the SONY.PAC on each Application Recovery CD. Once they are unpacked, on your harddrive, you can install them at will, with no arguement of “This ain’t a SONY INSTALLATION! Can’t do it!” sort of messages.
So, if you know me, that didn’t satisfy me. I wanted this install of WIN XP to be valid, to hang around (but not hang!) if it could. So I didn’t let go, and tackled that next.
Read, read, read all over the ‘net.
Finally the realization hit me, I DO have a valid key for this SONY PCG-GRV550 laptop. Sony puts a WIN XP sticker on the bottom of the machine. Bless them!
So, can I save this installation? Yes, I could, can, and did.
Bring up the activation dialog and there’s a button to “generate a new key”.
Read about it here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3BQ328874
The above directions will get you going if you just want to change the key your computer will activate with. If you’ve activated already, you can see how to un-activate first.
Future Installs for me will be a breeze. Hope this helps someone else!