My brother recently bought a nice sony vaio laptop with one of he vista flavors pre-installed (business one, i guess). Anyway, he wanted to " reformat " the computer so he used the Vaio Recovery Center that comes built-in.

Everything went as scheduled until he had to enter his serial number again. *BAHM*, his copy of vista is flagged as non-genuine, and he can't do sh** about it :|

oh well..
Have you read the manual or something? I'm guessing its non-genuine because it was already used (by him doh!) and microsoft aren't allowing you to use the same key twice (even though its on the same machine) which I think is stupid. I'm sure there's something that can be done.
I know about the one-machine limitation, but what's the point of having a total-restore utility that voids the license of your "genuine" operating system? What was sony thinking? a guy has to re-buy a license for $400 after using their restoration utility?
IMHO Welcome to M$ World, money sucking machines world. Install linux, and free downloadable Gentoo CD will be ur restoration CD :-D
IMHO Welcome to M$ World, money sucking machines world. Install linux, and free downloadable Gentoo CD will be ur restoration CD :-D
Denys, i'm already on Linux ^^. If you read the my first post well, I said it was my brother who was having this issue :) - And he won't make the switch.