XP unactivated

[CHayes1126]

Ive had my dell laptop for about 4 years. Nothing has ever gone wrong with windows XP. Yesterday I turned my computer on and it said Windows needs to be activated, then it gave me two options to restart now or remind me later. Remind me later does nothing but bring up that window again. Restart does the obvious and restarts then loads the same error screen again. I didn't think much of this because I was about to reformat anyway. So I reformatted, everything looked fine. Then it said windows needs to be activated. So it asks me to activate over the internet, which I click. Well, it cant find my internet yet because I have not installed my Ethernet card drivers yet. So I say activate later, because there is no over the phone activation option. When I hit activate later I am faced with the same problem I was earlier with the restart now or remind me later option. Im at a loss on how to fix this, any ideas would be great.

[glc]

A Dell should not require activation if you use a Dell reinstall CD. If you use a generic CD, it cannot be activated if you install it with the Dell key code.

Instead of reformatting, you should have pressed Ctrl+F11 on startup and used the system recovery.

At this point, you are going to have to call an agent to activate it, and explain what has transpired.

[CHayes1126]

fun

[glc]

It's not that bad.