Restoring OFFICIAL Windows Vista on a laptop

Recently, I had to tinker with a laptop on which the “good Samaritans” decided to replace the official English Vista with an unofficial, but Russian XP, and they did not take into account that the model is completely new and drivers for many parts of the most worthy iron exist only under Vista.

So, let's begin:
- baseline
- ACER laptop, shipping with Vista Home Premium (there is a sticker)
- Vista has been activated
- After that, the HDD was formatted! and put the Russian XP
- Lastly, imagine another very upset owner who does not have the iron floor in his new laptop of a very decent configuration

Here I will make a small digression. As far as I was able to find out, ACER laptops have their own set of programs for restoring a computer, even with a complete system failure. Drivers and other delights are delivered on hidden disk partitions and, accordingly, they do not deliver ANY disks together with the laptop.
This was the main ambush.
')
Search on the Internet, how to restore and activate Vista, did not lead to positive results.
Then the following plan was developed:
- Put Vista Home Premium English from a pirated disc
- Enter the product key, proudly shining on the sticker

At first glance, a very healthy plan and everything should have worked, but microsoft is a mysterious company that has very much cracked with the activation of its products :)

As you may have guessed, the original plan led to the presence of an installed whist, which completely refused to accept the serial key for activation and proudly reported that you had 30 days left ...

But giving up is not our method. Putting the pirate to Vista was also not an option, because small-time patches periodically roll patches that successfully block the possibility of hacking.

And then began an intensive search for options.

The decision came from an unexpected side. From colleagues.
As it turned out, all versions of Vista for Notebooks are tied to the manufacturer.
The alignment is as follows:
- The information about its serial number and the version of Vista with which it comes is registered in the BIOS of the laptop
- To activate, you must have a certificate file from the manufacturer, in this case ACER.XRM-MS
- This file must be imported into the installed system using the command
% WINDIR% \ SYSTEM32 \ SLMGR.VBS -ILC C: \ ACER.XRM-MS

When connected to the Internet activation occurs in automatic mode.
Voila, we got a restored and activated system on our laptop.

I hope for someone this information will be useful, thank you for reading to the end.