As time goes on, people loose things. Recently I was doing a little repair on a friends laptop. There was a lot wrong with it. Viruses, random errors, missing files. I think that at some point his laptop got hit with a really heavy virus that borked things up permanently. Not to mention he was using one of those registry mechanic style software suites (which Ive never had anything but problems using and I never recommend anyone to use them).

After getting things sorted out to a usable state, I decided I was just going to wipe the whole thing out and start from scratch. I called and found out what he wanted to back up, made the backup, then proceeded to reinstall his Windows XP Pro.

There was one problem

He didn’t have any of the software that came with the laptop (Im guessing its about 3-4 years old) and there was no recovery partition. On the bottom of the laptop, like most laptops was the certificate of authenticity which also had the cd key for his OEM version of Windows XP pro.

I haven’t used any type of bit torrent or anything like that in a long while so I had to download Utorrent and I went searching for a OEM version of Windows XP Pro. Once I found it, I then downloaded the free version of Virtual PC 2007 (yes it really is free, available at Microsoft’s website) and installed it on my PC. I wanted to test everything out to make sure things work before I wiped his laptop clean.

Needless to say, it worked, with his legitimate CD key and I was able to install and activate WinXP pro on his computer.

I don’t know how legal that is, Im guessing it shouldn’t be anything wrong with it since he did own the OEM version…just lost the cd. but if you find yourself in that situation, this may be an option.