Well that was easy: Reactivating Windows Vista

This just happened to me about 20 minutes ago:

A few hours ago I opened up my new 320GB hard drive and used Seagate's fancy software to clone and replace the drive. To my surprise it went very quickly and Vista started right up!

Then... Vista decided to do what it does best and say my product key was no longer valid because it was used on another computer. It gave me a nice message saying I had three days to activate. My choices were to buy a new key, enter a new key, or contact Microsoft.

So, I clicked the phone option, rattled off 9 groups of 6 digits, twice, once to a computer and once to a human, and then another 9 groups of 6 digits were rattled back at me. Click the next button and problem solved!

From what I've heard, apparently this typically happens after you change out lots of hard ware. Apparently a new hard drive counts! Probably the most common, if just most talked about, trigger is swapping out graphics cards every other month.

Since I at least attempt to blog about my technical problems this seemed perfect.

Overall I'm very happy, if not surprised, at how fast and easy it was to resolve this problem.