Activation Backup & Restore for OEM Windows Vista and Windows 7

===============================================================

Brian Mathis <bmathis-abr at

============ directedge.us>

About:
------
This package provides utilities to backup and restore the activation
files in OEM versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 that are
pre-activated at the factory. It probably won't work on activation
that was performed online or over the phone.

Support & Documentation:

------------------------
For problems or questions, please see this forum on notebookreview.com:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228

Instructions:
-------------
1. Unzip/copy this folder to an external USB/flash drive
2. Run "activation_backup.exe"
3. Reinstall Windows
4. Run "activation_restore.exe"

The new install should now be activated.

Description:
------------
"activation_backup" will create 2 files on your USB drive:
backup-key.txt: Backup license key
backup-cert.xrm-ms: Backup activation certificate

"activation_restore" will use those 2 files to restore your

activation once you have done a clean install.

Command-Line Options:
---------------------
activation_restore:
--silent
Restores the activation without prompting or producing
any output. This is useful for automatically activating
when doing unattended installations.

Revision History:
-----------------
24-Jun-2007:
Beta release

28-Jun-2007: ABRbeta1
Public Beta

17-Jul-2007: ABRbeta2
Fixed 64-bit backup. activation_backup should now
 work on both 32bit and 64bit Vista

11-Oct-2007: ABRbeta3
Check that created files are not empty to give better warning
if there's a failure, and changed "Activation Successful" to
"Please check the activation", because it's not reallt checking
if it was successful or not.

20-May-2008: ABR 1.0

Added the "--silent" command line option to activation_restore

Bug Fix:
Some backup-cert.xrm-ms files were corrupted during backup, causing
the restore to fail. This fix resolves the corruption and allows
previously corrupted files to successfully restore activation.

31-Oct-2009: ABR 1.7 beta 1

Added support for Windows 7 OEM Installations