Windows 7 Activation

Windows 7 is available for purchase at a discount from the Microsoft student and teacher “Ultimate Steal” website. This sounds great. Now to upgrade from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7 you need to do a clean install. So far so good.

Unfortunately, Windows 7 will then tell you that

The following failure occurred while trying to use the product key:
Code:
0xC004F061

Description:
The Software Licensing Service determined that this specified product
key can only be used for upgrading, not clean installations.

Yikes!

Even though this is an upgrade bought straight from Microsoft themselves, it doesn’t play ball… ;-(

The telephone activation people don’t know what to do but thank goodness, there’s a “simple” solution on the Microsoft website: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7install/thread/017fc495-95f6-4fa7-9c96-ebd5875d74e8

Digital River responded with instructions on how to correct problem.

Open regedit.exe with Start Menu Search and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/

Change MediaBootInstall from “1” to “0”.

Close RegEdit.

Start Menu on the Command Line utility. Right-click this shortcut and choose “Run as administrator.”
Click Yes to the UAC prompt.

In the command line window, type: slmgr /rearm press enter

wait for the “Command completed successfully” dialog.

Then, close the command line window and reboot.
After Windows 7 reboots, Right Click Computer select Properties select change product Key.
If the Key does not work now please contact Microsoft technical support at:

Web: http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx
Phone: 1-800-MICROSOFT (1-800-642-7676)
Wow Digital River stepped up to fix my problem.

It seems a mighty kludge!!