Simonthegeek

Windows Vista wants to be reinstalled just to activate

I saw a really odd one today. A Windows Vista (basic) machine suddenly decided that it had to be reinstalled, for no reason. It just claimed that it had to be activated (which it already was) and the only way to achieve this, according to the error message, was to reinstall the entire operating system – which seemed a little like swatting a fly with a bazooka to me.

The actual error message was “windows must be reinstalled to activate. Please insert the Windows CD or DVD to begin reinstallation”.

I guessed there must be an easier way around this, and eventually I worked this out:
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Transfer Outlook’s Email Address History

You know when you start typing an address into the ‘to’ field in an Outlook email and you see the drop down list of recently used addresses (a bit like the history in Internet Explorer), well that’s pretty handy isn’t it? Well it is, let me tell you. And it’s pretty annoying when you make some changes to your Outlook setup and you loose that history. Well, here’s how you get it back, or transfer it to a new computer:
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