Disclaimer: I sincerely believe this guide to be on the legitimate side and I in no way support the use of this guide for purposes other than activating Vista on your Viste preinstalled Lenovo laptop!
I recently bought a T60 [...]
The first thing I did when I bought my T60 was to clean install Vista. I suppose everyone knows the benefits of this but what not many people know is that you can’t automatically activate Vista using the product key which is located in the sticker under your laptop. You must go through the telephone activation route which is sometimes really boring or even worse, unusable. I also didn’t want to use any of my spare MSDNAA licences because… I payed for this laptop’s Vista licence and I might as well make it work!
So I started digging on how I can activate my T60 the same way Lenovo activates them during the factory restore. I’ve found out that Lenovo (and other OEMs) use a different product key, not the one you see in the sticker, which is hidden in the restore partition (or the discs you made yourself). This product key in combination with a license file that Microsoft has given to each OEM can activate windows without the need of online or telephone activation. Ofcourse for the product key/license file to work your BIOS must be compatible (aka support SLIC - Software Licensing Description Table) so that you can’t
ilegally use this technique on every pc you own (doh!).
Here are the steps for a successful offline activation:
1. While you are using your factory preinstalled Vista find out your REAL OEM product key. You can use many utilities for this, like TweakVI but the easiest one is the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder. Print or write your product key.
2. Clean install Vista using either a retail DVD or with the Windows Anytime Upgrade DVD that might have been included in your Lenovo purchase. They are exactly the same media so no need to go the ware… *ahmm you know * way! When asked for your product key during installation enter the product you found in step 1 and NOT the product key which is written on the sticker under your laptop.
3. Find the Lenovo OEM licence file. It is found in your recovery media. For example if you wrote 2 DVDs with the R&R4 program the licence file is located in the data DVD (big one) into an imz archive (actually an encrypted zip archive) named 0ADPE07.IMZ Inside that archive you must find
SWWORK\C\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\OEM\lenovo.oemcert.100036.xrm-ms
The problem with all the archives in the recovery DVD is that they are encrypted! I am currently brute forcing them but it will take days to find the correct password. So to save us some trouble we can find it on the net by searching Google for lenovo.oemcert.100036.xrm-ms. Download this file and place it somewhere (for easy install put it C:\)
4. Now we can oem/offline activate Vista by issuing the following well documented and supported by Microsoft commands. These
are:
slmgr –ilc path/to/licence/file/lenovo.oemcert.100036.xrm-ms
(a message should pop after a while telling you that it installed correctly)
slmgr –ato
(another message should pop which says that vista is now activated!)
Now go to Control Panel -> System and see that you are actually activated!
I hope this mini guide will help some of you do a clean Vista OEM installation without the need of the boring telephone activation.
