I eventually got around to installing XP on my friends Dimension 2400. As he did not have any restore CD’s, I had to use a copy of XP that I had myself. The install itself went fine, and after about an hour or so I had a working install. The only problem was that XP wanted to be activated. As the product key was an OEM one, it’s not going to activate. So now I’m stuck. I can either use a crack to bypass the activation, or I can try to get a copy of the restore cd’s.
As this is a perfectly legal install, I’d prefer not to resort to have to use a crack. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be any way to order restore CD’s from the Dell website.
I have created an image of the hard-drive, so I can restore that back if I need to, but that isn’t going to do a whole lot except get me back to square one.
I’ll have to think about this one a bit, and see if there is anyway that I can get the original Dell OS back onto the system.