No guarantees it’ll work though, I did this about a year ago, but the activation servers has supposedly been down for upwards of two so anything can happen. I can check my physical product key to see what the number was.Įdit: try automated activation at 88 (assuming you’re in the US, there are different numbers by country), I went through part of the process and it seemed familiar but I’m not activating a new XP pc so I couldn’t test all the way through. I know this isn’t the most thorough answer but I hope it helps. I have had the unfortunate expereince of installing with the Dell media an XP SP3 disc on an XP OEM box pre-SP1 and it would not accept the activation key. While the service was in place for the activation of Windows 7/10 product keys, it was able to activate my XP key after going through the correct prompts (it’s been a while but I just remember repeatedly selecting the “other” dialogue option.) it eventually redirected me to an activation over text prompt and that seemed to do it. With my key came a call in number for the activation and it redirected me to an auto call service. Instead restart and boot into SAFEBOOTOPTIONMinimal, press F8 during boot in order to access the SafeMode options. You will find your Windows XP product key there. Format the HDD and reinstall Windows XP, but do not activate the operating system. Open the file UNATTEND.txt and scroll down to the last line.

Explore the CD and navigate to the i386 folder. I activated my copy about a year ago, sometime after the activation servers had supposedly been turned off. If you have misplaced your Windows XP product key, you can still recover it from your original installation CD, by follow these steps: Insert the installation CD into your CD / DVD Drive.

Activate xp sp3 without key