I know that computer technicians, many times, were given Dell recovery disks for the OS itself. I'm not sure how it's done, but my guess would be they say 'we made 50 machines, model X, with Home and we used 50 Home stickers' and that's the end of it. Many years ago I talked with different support people and they all said that they had no list of COA stickers tied to serial numbers. Do you mean putting Pro stickers on machines with Home? I'm sure they do need to track that, yes. I'm not sure what you mean about an OEM mismatching stickers. As long as a BIOS check is run by the OEM disk that sticker just sits there, doing nothing. The key on the sticker is never used unless the owner re-installs Windows using an OEM disk that does not have built in BIOS checking. Once the machine gets to you it is NOT using the key on the sticker. I doubt those records are something general support staff would have access to though, it's probably buried in inventory and management logs nobody ever looks at outside an audit.ĭell was not the only one to use BIOS activation back in the XP days - HP did it, Toshiba did it, Sony did it, and I imagine others did too, but that doesn't really matter. Otherwise the OEM could intentionally or accidentally be mismatching installs & stickers. Not for support reasons, but for auditing reasons should they ever need to prove to Microsoft that XYZ key was assigned and shipped with ABC serial numbered device. Once the machine gets to you, it's using that key on the sticker.Īs for them keeping track, they'd be remiss not to. Thats the thing, there is no built-in key going back to Vista except for Dell BIOSes, the sticker was the install key hence the problem. The sticker gets applied at the factory, yes, but I can't remember ever hearing about an OEM keeping track of the key itself.
There was no reason for them to, so why would they? The factory install uses a built in key, not the one on the sticker, so the key on the sticker means nothing to them. You *might* be able to fight with ASUS to pull the shipped key from the serial number in their database (assuming they keep them that long),
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