Windows 7 was seen as the savior of millions who were stuck with the Windows Vista operating system. With a sleek look and performance parameters outstripping that of its predecessor, Windows 7 looked to live up to its expectations. It certainly impressed beta testers and garnered glowing reviews.If you are connecting to a computer with Windows 7 installed on it remotely or using a computer with multiple users then you might face this issue. Due to excessive sale and purchase of pirated copies of Windows, now Microsoft has made it compulsory to get your copy of Windows activated after installing it on you machine. So once you run a freshly installed copy of Windows, the system automatically tries to activate your copy through internet. If it’s not a genuine one then, you’ll find certain issues that are described in the paragraph below.

Symptoms

Firstly when you log on to your Windows 7 it’ll display a message telling you that your copy of Windows is not genuine and needs to be activated. Secondly your desktop background goes black each time you log on. Even if you try to put on a new wallpaper it just goes black every time you log on to Windows 7. Not only that but you will also find a note in the right hand lower corner of your desktop telling you that your windows is not genuine and you need to get it activated. In the system properties menu, there’ll be a message saying,

“You must activate today.  Activate Windows now”

And also if you try to view the licensing status of your Windows 7, it’ll give you the following error message.

“Error: 0x80070005 Access denied: the requested action requires elevated privileges”

All this can get really irritating especially if you are a new user. Due to increasing rate of piracy, Microsoft is getting more and more strict with newer versions of all of its software applications. Some causes and solutions are described in the following paragraph.

Solutions

First of all if it’s a new laptop or PC with Windows 7 provided by the manufacturer, then you should contact that company for assistance. It is a fault on there behalf and they should be responsible for it.

Incase you have installed it from a CD on your own, then there can be various reasons. First and very predictable reason is that you have bought a pirated CD. Unfortunately you’ll have to buy a new original one. Now if you are sure that your CD is original then one most probable reason is that you have connected a plug and play GPO (Group Policy Object) to your computer. Sometimes, it is possible that the Windows might be appearing to be inactive, while it is actually activated, due to Group policy settings. So you basically need to edit those settings. There are a couple of other options as well. The problem and the solution are stated more in detail on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2008385/en-us. If you are not aware of what a GPO is then you can check out details about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Policy_Object.