So yesterday, I receieved a nVidia GeForce 7900GTX from my dad’s computer, because it wasn’t working properly for him with Call of Duty 4. He kept getting blue screens of death, so he suggested that we trade graphics cards, which we did. Call of Duty 4 works fine for him now, but I ran into a problem when I put in the 7900GTX.

I started up my computer, and installed the new drivers for the graphics card, and that’s when things got bad. My computer started up, telling me I MUST activate windows at that very moment. Ok, that’s just fine, but I hit yes to activate, then I see my desktop background for 5 seconds or so (no explorer or buttons, just the background), and then it logs me out automatically. WTF?

Fortunately, I was able to get into windows through Safe Mode with no networking, so I could at least access my files. This still didn’t help, because I wasn’t in the mood to move data around and reformat my computer. I called Microsoft, and explained the situation…twice, and had to mention my CD Key to them…three times (first guy couldn’t comprihend my words).

I finally get on the phone with someone I know who’s native language isn’t English (It seems everyone who works at Microsoft isn’t American, suprize suprize), and I begin telling him the situation. He keeps trying to tell me to go into windows and get on the internet to get certain info, but I had to say that I couldn’t 3 or 4 times before he got the point.

To make the rest of the story short, I spent a good 2 and a half hours on the phone trying to the fix the problem, and after every step or so, the guy would step away from the phone for 2 or 3 minutes to get his next step.

I could of fixed this problem in less time the entire call took, but I didn’t want to move my data over to my secondary drive to reformat my computer. But after the phone call, I spent the rest of my day just reformating my 120gb HD (took an hour by itself), and reinstalling windows. Window’s doesn’t give the option to split a hard drive into multiple partitions for installation, which was annoying enough. I did get Windows XP back up and running, and the updates in without a hassle.

So yesterday sure did stink, and I got nothing done, but at least I got a sparkly 7900GTX out of the mix! (I now have the most powerful PC in my house :D)

Tags: microsoft, windows, service, activation