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Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

It was a screwup on his part to duplicate the trademarks. Should have just been 'repairco's windows 7 reinstallation discs for old dells' or something to that effect.

If its a major OEM machine like dell/lenovo/hp, there are OEM specific keys in the BIOS. This is why they use manufacturer cd's and not retail ones (fairly certain you can't use microsoft downloaded iso for an oem, but correct me if wrong) You need a certificate component, the bios slic strings, and a OEM key off the coa: http://www.squidworks.net/2015/03/how-to-windows-7-oem-activ...

Point being, if the OEM stopped providing the discs and he only charged to cover costs of the medium without profiting I fail to see Microsoft's logic here.

EDIT: I stand corrected, they weren't selling these discs for a quarter as articles reported.

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He didn't just duplicate the trademarks. He went out of his way to make the discs identical to the real discs. Some of his product was rejected by his customer because they were not identical.

> he only charged to cover costs of the medium without profiting

This was a profit making venture. You can see his invoices here: https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/2LU...

Thanks for that. Tech jouralism really is dead I guess.

In the articles I read nobody seemed to know you need an OEM cert to activate an OEM key and nobody bothered to read the exhibit where they talk about ebay'ing discs for $30-$40 and getting a steady cash stream.

> fairly certain you can't use Microsoft downloaded iso for an oem

ISOs downloaded through Microsoft's Windows Media Creation Tool [1] will read the product key from the BIOS of OEM PCs that were sold with Windows 10 and will auto-activate when connected to the Internet.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10

Yeah that's for Windows 10 (and 8)with UEFI and secureboot. This is a recycler and the systems described are mostly win7 and xp sp3. I don't think that installer will work for SLIC OEM keys in oldskool bios.

BIOS embedded Lic started to appear with windows 7. Windows XP did not have have BIOS embedded Software Licenses but windows 7 did via some vendors (Dell was one of them)

I'm aware and being careful to distinguish retail from large OEM's. The large OEM's had embedded strings in their bios (SLIC/SLP), a cert on the installer, and a coa slapped on the case somewhere

Vista had slic keys as well. XP had SLP oem keys which I'm a bit less familiar with. This site is like a black hole of messy information on the topic: http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/

Somewhere deep in the bowels of it is a section on how to tell which version of windows (xp/vista/7) your oem system is licensed up to. It involves using rw-everything and looking at sliic table version. I have upgraded a dell vista system to a valid 7 license in the past by doing official bios update (updates the slic version) and doing a clean install.

> It involves using rw-everything and looking at SLIC table version.

There's a much easier method that automates all of that for you: the Multi-OEM/Retail Project (MRP) [1]. This queries the SLIC or MSDM tables for you during the installation of Windows and enables you to create a single DVD or USB drive that works with OEM PCs from 131 different manufacturers.

All you have to do is copy the included '$oem$' folder to the 'sources' folder of your Windows 10, 8.x, 7 or Windows Vista ISO/USB and it takes care of the rest.

The MRP is designed to determine what motherboard manufacturer is fitted and find the DMI, (board information), to then check against a database to pick the right theme, logo's etc. Along side this, if the computer has either a MSDM key or SLIC within the bios, to check that against the database and attempt to allow LEGAL activation as the Computer's OEM suppliers would do. For those with a Windows 10 Digital Licence (HWID), or MSDM key your computer should auto-activate when you go online, providing you have installed the correct Edition for the HWID/MSDM key.

[1] https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/multi-oem-retail-pr...

Aren't Win10 licenses tied to both the serial in the UEFI and the CPU ID (so if you need to replace one or the other, it will still activate?)

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