Well, it came as no surprise. You may be a victim of software counterfeiting.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

Should be reported to ebay at once.

Well, if you fancy a full time upaid job which is unlikely to have any effect you could spend all day reporting ebay scams and having your reports ignored whilst more scams are posted faster than you can report them

I avoid ebay scams very very simply ...




... I don't do ebay, it really is that easy.

[Saab Dastard]

reporting ebay scams and having your reports ignored

I find ebay very good at responding to problems with listings that are brought to their attention.

I certainly don't go out of my way to search for such listings, though!

My ebay experience has actually been very positive over the last 5 years, although I am certainly no apologist for them.

SD

[jimtherev]

Originally Posted by Keef

...Later, I bought a laptop with a preinstalled XP pro and a licence key label stuck to it - but no CD.

The laptop's installation went wacky, so I reinstalled off the CD I bought for the desktop. When it came to validation, it complained and refused to activate. I phoned the number it gave, explained to the MS person on the phone, gave her the licence key details off the laptop, and was told a long stream of numbers to type in. That activated the laptop, which has been fine ever since...

I bought a new box t'other day with XP Pro installed, again, no disk, no COA. First thing I did was the MSoft update/validate thing: all ok, and I have a genuine XP Pro disk around from another machine. But with no COA...
but Googling produced a neat little prog called Keyfinder: downloaded, ran it, and hey I have a COA number, should I ever (as if!) trash me hard drive and need to reinstall. Hope never to use it

[mixture]

Morally, it seems very high handed of MS to say that you can't change your mother board.

Just think about your statement logically for a moment.

The motherboard is the PC.

Without the motherboard, the PC is just a pile of metal. A hard drive on it's own means nothing as it requires the motherboard with it's BIOS etc to boot off the hard drive. The motherboard is biggest single driver of PC spec due to it housiing many of the major performance features (e.g. CPU etc.)

Therefore Microsoft are quite right when they say you can upgrade your hard drive, graphics cards, memory to your hearts content, but not your motherboard.

Replacing a broken motherboard is, of course, generally another matter, particularly if done under warranty.