Windows Xp recovery HP DC5800 - help please

Having a bad time with a brand new HP machine I brought home to sort our ready for school on Monday.

Booted up fine. Ubninstalled McAfee & Office 2007, no problem... until I rebooted when I got an error that I couldn't get rid of.

No problem I thought... just reinstall windows xp....

Ever wish you hadn't?

I've booted from the supplied recovery disk. Reformatted the HDD and got to the bit where the product key is required.

The Product key label stuck to the machine is for Vista Business OEM (the HP label says the machine is "OS: downgraded to XP pro")

There is no XP label.

The Product key for Vista doesn't workl... XP Pro setup says it is not valid. I tried HP online support but that seems to be daytime Monday to Friday.

Have I missed something? Or am I going to have to wait for Monday?

You just need to install it with a different XP key that you already have (you'll probably want one off another hp machine to make it work with the supplied disk), once it is installed and you get to the activation screen choose to activate it over the phone instead of online. Microsoft will then take down the Vista key and provide instructions on the next step to activate it.

How to downgrade from Vista to XP News - PC Advisor

Thanks for that SYNACK. I'll try it with the Product Key for my laptop here. It's Toshiba, so if it doesn't work it'll have to wait until I get back to school on Monday for an HP key.

So much for trying to speed things up. If I've one machine to sort out, I prefer to do it at home where I can watch TV/cook dinner/enjoy a bottle of wine during the boring bits! Should have known this strategy would trip me up!

Guess I'll just have to open the bottle anyway now! Start again in the morning! (without the wine!)

I do the same thing when dealing with laptops, I only wish that I had a high speed link into the school network at home so that I could do domain joining and stuff like that from home as well. Unfortunately doing GPO software installs takes a little to long over a VPN link to be practical.

Good luck with your serial key :)