asked on

OEM pre-installed Microsoft Office

My client has an Acer Aspire laptop, model 5532. Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. She bought it Nov 2009. Warranty is expired.

The PC became very slow and corrupted, to the point I couldn't even install Windows 7 SP1 because of errors. Long story short, I re-installed the OS fresh from the recovery partition. Went OK.

Problem:
There is a trial version of MS Office Home and Student 2007 on the PC and it's asking for a software key. No surprise to me. Client, however, claims that when they bought this PC, it came with the Office and she didn't have to pay for any licences. "It just worked." I found it hard to believe, but before re-installing the OS, I did open Word for a second and it did not ask for a key or anything.

Questions:
Is it possible that Acer put some sort of OEM Office on a $300 laptop? If so, how would I put it back on? Who would provide support?

SOLUTION

als315

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

rindi

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

Levi Gwyn

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

Member_2_6481058

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Lee W, MVP

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

detail_seeker

ASKER

I purposely used up the 25 sessions with Word and Excel to see what happens after trial. At that point both programs would open a document, but I could not edit anything at all, not even type a single character.

Client mentioned they found a $125 charge from Best Buy shortly after the laptop purchase, so I think they really bought the license and forgot and then lost the key and receipt. You're right. Had I backed up the entire HDD image, I probably could have dug up that key from the depths of the registry, but oh well. I warned them plenty before the re-install, and they insisted it was pre-activated.

I showed the client OpenOffice and they seem OK with that. Aside from rich text formatting, they weren't using much of Word features anyway. It's amazing how many people pay for the whole MS office just to use the same thing they get in WordPad for free.

Thank you all for the great responses.