Tag Archives: Activation

Troubleshooting Office 2010 & 2013 Activation

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Microsoft Office 2010 and 2013 volume license editions use the Volume License 2.0 mechanism to manage activation. Office 2010 and 2013 will activate against our campus Key Management Service (KMS), without user intervention, in a manner similar to Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Occasionally, the activation process doesn’t work. Problems are usually related to network communication with the KMS. Below are some steps to identify and resolve problems that might occur during activation.

Gather Information.

Gathering data is essential to fixing problems. If you ask me (or other IT staff) for help with Office 2010 activation, the first thing I will ask from you is the output of the commands in the steps below.

There are a few steps that will make it easy to collect all the output of your troubleshooting steps.

  • Open an elevated Command Prompt (Run As Administrator)
  • Change the Properties of the command prompt window to increase the Screen Buffer
    height to, say, 3000 lines. This will prevent you losing earlier steps as the lines scroll off the screen.
  • Run cscript /h:cscript, which changes the default script host to cscript, so that output will go to the command prompt instead of a pop-up dialog box.

When you are ready to copy the text from the command prompt, right-click the title bar of the window, select Edit > Select All, and then Control-C to Copy the text to the clipboard. Then you can paste the text to any place you want; a webmail message, a footprint entry, or a text file in notepad.

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Troubleshooting Windows Activation

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I recently helped a colleague with a Windows Vista Activation problem. The client system, running Vista Enterprise SP1, was unable to activate against our KMS Server. Since the system had SP1, the client was spared Reduced Functionality Mode, but she was getting frequent Windows Genuine warnings.

Here are some troubleshooting steps — for my future reference as much as anyone else’s — for for gathering information for diagnosing and resolving Vista and Windows 7 activation issues.

Quick Fix: Try this first!

Most Windows activation issues I’ve encountered are resolved by entering the appropriate product key (not a secret; see footnote):

Vista Enterprise Volume: VKK3X-68KWM-X2YGT-QR4M6-4BWMV
Windows 7 Enterprise Volume: 33PXH-7Y6KF-2VJC9-XBBR8-HVTHH

If you’re in Reduced Functionality mode, one of the options on the Windows Activation dialog box is to re-type or enter a new product key. Reduced Functionality mode has been removed from Vista SP1; however, alerts will still be presented. Alternatively, a new product key can be entered in the System control panel.

In either case, enter the code above and attempt to reactivate. If it works, you should be all set. If it doesn’t, the following steps will help identify the issue.

Gathering Information.

Gathering data is essential to fixing problems. If you ask me (or other IT staff) for help with Windows activation, the first thing I will ask from you is the output of the commands below.

I recommend opening a text editor and copying all the commands and output into a file, which you can send to us if you need additional help resolving the activation issue.

NOTE: All these steps require running commands from a console window (cmd.exe), which you may need to run As Administrator. These commands work in both Windows Vista and Windows 7.

1. Run ipconfig /all to capture current IP configuration information.

This could tell us whether the system is in a netreg-ed subnet and needs to register at http://netreg.uvm.edu, or if there are other basic network configuration problems. We really just need the Ethernet adapter, assuming that’s what is being used to connect the system to the network. We don’t need all the additional tunneling adapters, etc. If someone is using a wireless adapter, possibly with the VPN client, then info about those adapters also should be captured.

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