lil problem with Widows XP!!!

Hi all, I’m still trying to get use to the new look of the web site but its cool. About 3 weeks ago I went on vacation to visit Families on the East coast. While there my brother’s hard drive crashed. The first thing he does is call me. We ruled that’s it was the Hard drive. So he went down to the Bestbuy and bought a 250gig HDD installed it. He was freaking out because he has no idea how to install an OS. I told him that I would install it when I got back, but he said NO... His Guild was going to raid MC the next day and needed to get XP up NOW, He LOVES WoW. He asked me where the XP install disc was, I told him where and so he got it and started the install. I walked him threw the whole install process. And told him in the end that he needed all the High priority updates and service pack 2. He not only Downloaded SP2 but IE7 as well, I thought no biggie.

Well after my trip I get home to find my brothers PC on the screensaver saying Windows XP Pro... The thing is my brothers PC came with home not pro. Soon after I find this out I open up my XPS laptop and try to Download some up dates. I get a lot of failed notices , I start looking threw my Brothers desk and I find my XP pro install Disc that came with my Laptop X( . He installed my laptops OS on his desktop.

When I got my laptop I only needed to update it a few times, I hate IE7 so I never installed it, But IE7 requires a unique Validation process that my laptop never went threw. When my brother downloaded IE7 and went threw that validation process, that bound that XP Pro key to his PC and not my laptop...

Is there a way that I can reclaimed my Pro key and reinstate his home key? All copies of XP are the real deal and we have had Zero problems before. Or is there a thing were I can upgrade his home edition to Pro??? I don’t want to put Vista on the Box yet. Not sure if we will be updating that Pc anymore... Is there anything I can do to get my Pro key back?


THX
-Z

So if I reinstall Home on his Box then it will release that key? If thats the case thin im all for that, Im kinda tight on cash being it being cristmas and all, THX for the Tips


and to dougadamsfan:

No the error I get is in the update window, When XP is checking for updates it tells me it found some, then it fail on getting them. I have never had a failure before. All my firewall setting were the same as I have updated My XPS in the passed B4.

THX
-Z