Windows woes !

[DJ Paulie]

I have a Logitech webcam and uninstalled it a while ago, but kept the drivers installed. I re attached it today and it installed after a few hiccups. Since then I get a watermark saying 'Windows 7 Build 7601 this copy of windows is not genuine' Now I know it is beacuse this is only 6 months old. Also I switched it off earlier today and when I turned it back on my desktop wallpaper was gone. I've turned it back and the watermark has gone.

Also for some reason I can't turn system restore on, when I open it I get a message saying 'system restore is not turned on' but when I check in system settings it says it is monitoring all my drives. I've run Registry mechanic, Ccleaner, Spybot, Malware bytes and even Combofix, all without success.

Also in the system info page it says in the windows activation section status unavailable and Product ID not available.

Any ideas ? :confused:

[DJ Paulie]

Also there are no restore points available when I use windows recovery

[katman]

Is there an option to reactivate it ?

The lack of restore points could be due to the fact that it doesnt think its a genuine copy. I believe Windows periodically checks to see that it is active and I have has machines in the past that have come up with that message because the licence key has been copied by someone and used on another PC. It may also have assumed that state becuase it failed to contact the activation server. I currently have several machine that cant contact time.windows.com and had to change our work domain to look at a different time server as our entire network was 4 minutes slow !

Unlike XP, Vista and Windows 7 are much more antisocial with an unactivated copy. they nag to start with and they go into what Microsoft describe as "Limited Funtionality"

When I first converted a machine to Vista I couldnt get a driver for the network card so couldnt activate it. It took me over a month to find one and when I went to install it, the PC was in "limited" mode. It said I had to activate and all it would let me do was use Internet Explorer or online activation.... except that I didnt have a working network so couldnt do anything except a reinstall!

[Creature]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh windows - forgotten what all the above agro was like.

If it wont let you re activate it then you will have to buy a new one ! thats microsofts stance