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I installed a legally purchased OEM license of Windows 7 from Newegg. I installed it onto a new iMac as a Boot Camp partition. I also installed a license of VMWare Fusion 3. However, when I access the Boot Camp partition through Fusion, I get activation problems.

What can I do?

2 Answers 2

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What can I do?

Buy a full version of Windows 7. The OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) versions of Windows are for... original equipment manufacturers. Of which you are not. You are violating the license agreement by installing Windows 7 OEM onto an iMac.

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If you have a legal copy, you ought to be able to call the Microsoft activation number (which can involve reading a lot of numbers over the phone), and they may be willing to fix the problem.

I suspect the problem stems from Windows trying to look at various attributes of the hardware and it's deduced, correctly or incorrectly, that it's not the same environment and therefore thinks you're trying to use two instances -or- that the installation changed enough that it simply wants you to revalidate.

That's gonna make it hard for you to resolve the problem yourself [legally].

In fairness, Microsoft's license may not want you to be able to do both with one copy of Windows.

 
<SOAPBOX>
This is the kind of licensing headache that makes OS X and Linux so attractive; you view yourself as one guy, the owner, who bought it, trying to use it on a single machine, and it's fighting you. Activations mean you're renting software, you just don't know for how long.
</SOAPBOX>

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  • This isn't a licensing headache, OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer. Unless this guy is Steve Jobs, he is in violation of the licensing agreement. So in this case activation is just doing its job. Mar 29, 2010 at 10:02

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