Activating Microsoft Vista MAK Edition

I've been having some problems with activating the Microsoft Vista^TM Business N edition I have installed on my Lenovo T60 Laptop. A while back I installed the KMS edition on it, but after 30 days I was unable to get it activate it and figured I should install the MAK edition instead and do online activation. That proved to not be as easy as I had imagined, as everytime I tried activating I got hit by "0x8007232B - DNS Name does not exist.". Clearly it was looking for a host it couldn't find, most likely a KMS server as my laptop is a member of my work domain. Today, I figured I would try again, and ended up entering my Open License MAK key again, and voilà it worked! So, if you are having problems activating your MAK based Vista install, try going to Control Panel -> System -> Windows Activation. Right on the lower right hand corner there should be an option to "Change product key". All I did was to re-enter the same key I used when initially installing my laptop and then it automatically activated itself. Strange that the key entered during install resulted in a DNS error, while the same key works without problem if you enter it later on. I won't even try to explain it, it's just one of those things. So far Vista is treating me good, and I'm very happy with how it performs so far. AMD/ATI released their new official Vista Graphics Drivers today too, but I was very disappointed that the Lenovo support site seems to be down and no new drivers for their products appear to be available the day Vista is officially released to everyone. I'll just have to wait to get the proper Thinkvantage software installed I guess. Update: The Lenovo support site was available right after this post was published, but there is still no ThinkVantage System Update™ version that supports Microsoft Vista^TM available.

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel