Microsoft Office XP key question

[Mr. Brass Bonanza]

I bought Microsoft Office XP for my laptop and loaded it fine. The laptop crashed and I had to load it again, and it was fine. Now my laptop has crashed again and I got a new laptop to replace it. This laptop has Vista on it, but the Microsoft people said Office XP is compatible with Vista. So when I was trying to load Office XP, I put the key in and it says it's invalid. I know this key is valid, however. I'm dumbfounded on why the key won't work, as it has before. Is there a website where I can go and plug in this key to see if it is valid? Maybe I'm just typing in a number or letter wrong and don't even know it. Do keys expire? I am so frustrated I want to throw the laptop out the window.

Thanks!

[Itchy]

I have never known a key to expire as it is attached to the disk that you bought which is its license.

I would make sure that you are typing it right. If you are and it still does not work I would take the laptop and program to the store where you bought it. Let them help figure it out.

Hope this helps :mickey:

[DisneyLE]

Is it the same office that you had previously loaded on the other laptop? I think product keys are designed to prevent people from installing the same software on multiple computers... so you may need to buy another package to get a new key.

[Itchy]

Although that is true. I recently bought a laptop and microsoft office, I have loaded it on 3 different computers in my home. I was told that this was allowed as long as they were on your computers.

[medic9016]

Is it the same office that you had previously loaded on the other laptop? I think product keys are designed to prevent people from installing the same software on multiple computers... so you may need to buy another package to get a new key.

You can load it on up to 3 computers. Make sure you are typing it correctly.

[Mr. Brass Bonanza]

I am typing it correctly. My wife tried it also and it won't work for her, either. Someone said it may be because this new laptop has a trial version of Office 2007, and that might be interfering with me trying to load Office XP/2002. Could that be?

Thanks.

[medic9016]

Yes that may be the problem. You could wait till the trial version expires and remove it or remove it now and load the full version you have bought.

[DizneyRox]

So, the key doesn't work, or it just won't activate? The key should be fine if you are typing it correctly, but as others said, you may be having trouble with 2007 being loaded. You can uninstall that and try again.

If the activation is what is failing, you may need to call Microsoft. They will ask you a million questions and then probably allow another activation. They may need to give you a code (usually longer than the product key) to get it activated.

What you are doing should be fine... I really dislike Microsoft''s activation scheme. It tends to punish the legit users more than the illegals.

[Scar]

With the exception of being able to post on Intercot, I know pretty much nothing about computers. ;) But, I can say for certain that I recently installed an old Microsoft Office XP on a new laptop with Vista, no problem.

[Mr. Brass Bonanza]

SUCCESS!!

Once again the folks at Intercot have helped me out. The problem was indeed the trial version on the laptop. Once I removed that, it accepted the key.

However, that wasn't the end of my troubles. During the loading process, I got an error saying it couldn't read an Excel help file on my c drive. There was no way around it. It was either "retry" or "cancel," and cancelling it stop the whole installation process. I tried retrying it a few times, then stopped the insanity (literally). What finally ended up working was launching the setup.exe from a DOS prompt. For whatever reason, that worked. (Kudos to Mrs. Brass Bonanza for the idea...at 5:00 AM this morning.) If someone has a possible explaination why that would have worked when launching it automatically the normal way didn't, I would be very interested.

In my over 10 years here, I have always said if something is to be known in the world, someone on Intercot knows it. I always find answers here. This forum is priceless.

Thanks guys! :thumbsup: