A friend purchased a used PC from an Auction website.

It had some problems, and after I had it sorted, he asked me for a written report.

This is what I sent him.

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When I first started the PC, it “froze” at the BIOS screen and it had a badly squealing case fan so I removed and lubricated it.

Then I investigated the freezing problem.

It responded to the TAB key which allowed it to display the POST screen, but would not respond to the DEL key to get into setup.

I checked a number of things but it wasn’t until I removed the modem card, that it started Windows… so the modem was faulty.

I tried to plug in my toolkit USB drive but it refused to recognise the drive.

I looked at device manager and it was totally empty (the first time I have ever seen this) so I started SERVICES.MSC and found more 90% of entries were set to disabled

There was no COA sticker, so I then booted of a toolkit CD to try and recover the Product Key but it was not available

I suspect this copy of Windows has been hacked so it could be installed on multiple PC’s but this was extremely poorly done, rendering Windows all but unusable.

Fortunately I had a copy of windows and a COA from a computer that had failed and been withdrawn from service.

I loaded this copy of Windows XP, updated it to SP3, found the required drivers from the manufacturers website and it is all going 100%

If the seller was not able to provide an authentic COA and install a legitimate copy of windows, why didn’t he sell it as a “no operating system installed”.

Crazy and quite illegal.