Having Trouble Activating Windows 7 RTM?
Posted by Clayton Cobb on August 9, 2009
After downloading and installing the new Windows 7 64-Bit Enterprise RTM and getting all of my apps installed along with the proper drivers and such, I wanted to check and see how much machine was doing with the new OS and all the extra stuff I have installed (Office 2010 Pro Plus, SharePoint Designer 2010, SharePoint Workspace 2010, Visio 2010, Skype, Live Messenger, etc.). The result was wonderful as my fairly weak desktop (cheap-o from 2 years ago) was moving very quickly and not using much RAM or processor. However, while checking my System info – Control Panel > System and Security > System (same as right-clicking on Computer and selecting Properties) – I noticed that I still needed to activate my fresh Windows 7 installation (Fig 1).
Fig 1 – System Info (post-activation)
However, when I clicked “Activate,” I got a strange DNS error. I fixed this by simply clicking “Change Product Key,” which you can see above, and I put in my product key again (same one I used during installation). This worked, and now I’m activated, but I figured more than one person will encounter the same thing, so…
**How about that beastly processor and RAM? Doing this screenshot just now showed me that I have a 1G RAM stick not seated, so I’ll go do that now. =D
**RAM fixed – 2.5G RAM is way better.
**This blog post was created and published using Word 2010
Stephen Noe said
Nice post – solved my problem simply! Hard to find so I cross posted.
Clayton Cobb said
Glad to help. I posted it due to being simple and hoping to save people time messing around.
Windows 7 Enterprise RTM Activation Fails « Dynamics CRM Usability Blog said
[…] I went out on the web and found a very simple solution to the problem posted by Clayton Cobb. […]