[chip]

I've got an old PC from work for home use, but its still configured for the network and I'm looking for help to reconfigure it for home use. The initial problems I'm having are adding new users, I get a message 'the user could not be granted user access because user does not exist'

I also cannot get the task manager up, it is greyed out when I press ctrl, alt, del.

Any help appreciated.

[philthomas]

Your company IT Admin folks have probabyt locked the system dowm and disabled various features.

Your best bet would be to grab an XP or Vista Installation disk and do a fresh install l of Windows

[chip]

I've got a XP disk but it is already installed on another PC. Would doing a re-install keep the existing OS product key?

[philthomas]

Nope ...... you will need another XP Disk, if we're to keep things legal

[serverguy]

Originally Posted by chip I've got a XP disk but it is already installed on another PC. Would doing a re-install keep the existing OS product key?

If the computer you got from work has a product key on the side of it, you can use any CD to reinstall XP and then just enter the (legal) key on the side of the machine.

If it argues with you about it, a quick call to Microsoft will sort it out. You are 100% legal as long as each computer has its own key.

You may need to extract the key from the registry if it isn't on the side of the case, a Google search will tell you how to do this.

One thing to consider though, is that this machine may have a corporate license key, or Volume Licensing Key, which you may not have the rights to use if you don't own it. I am not sure how the MS licensing works when a VLK registered OS is sold on second hand. But you own the original OS, its been paid for before, so you should be able to reinstall.