Product key help needed please

[rusmum]

If anyone can advise I would be grateful. I bought a laptop from carphone warehouse (windows 7). Every time I wand to use word it asks for a product key. I have scanned all the information that cane with the laptop and nothing. There is a sticker under the laptop which has a number (the right length) labelled product key but when i put this in it doesnt work??

Any ideas?

This is probably only a trial version of Word - did you buy the laptop 60 days ago?

You now have some options:

Stop using Word and use a different word processor - the one in the free OpenOffice suite is good, and will open all the files you have created in Word.

If you are a not using it for business purposes, you can buy Microsoft Office (which includes Word) Home and Student version. Microsoft is releasing a new version of Office, Office 2010, in June which means three things:

1. You can get all versions of Office 2007, including Home and Student, cheaper than usual - £60 for H&S from Amazon for example.

1. Office 2010 will be more expensive - you can pre-order H&S now for £110. It probably won't do anything you want to do any better or easier than 2007 though.

1. There is a beta version (a pre-release version, may have some bugs in it and has no guarantee) of Office 2010 which you can download for free and use until November, when you can buy the release version and the price might have dropped a bit by then. As long as you are willing to live with the risks of beta software, and the drain on your bandwidth (there are very frequent automatic updates) this might be a good option, but bear in mind that you get a lot more in the full beta version than you will in the Home and Student version, so don't start using Outlook for instance otherwise you will have a problem when the license runs out (unless you want to pay £600 or whatever it is for the full Office 2010 Professional).

The license key on the sticker is for Windows 7, not Word.

I wasnt aware it was a trial version! BOO!

The request for a key came up from the 1st use!

It would have been a trial version. My laptop was asking for the product key for Word too. Luckily I had one.
Macafee will do the same if it is installed.

gutted surely they should tell you this when you buy it. cant afford to buy so will have to do without!!

Get Open Office it's fine, very similar to Word, and free (so far)

If they weren't clear that it was a Trial version of MS Office when they were advertising the laptop then you'd have a legitimate complaint but I expect it was in the small print. Switching to OpenOffice should be fine!

Lots of machines come with Norton (Yuk!) pre-installed, as well as trial versions of MS Office, and/or time-limited versions of McAfee, etc.

need new anti virus which would you reccommend?