"not genuine" all of a sudden?

[trishanna]

I have a Toshiba Satellite A305 I bought from Best Buy in 2008 with Windows
Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1 with Microsoft Word 2002 (10.6854.6845)
SP3. It has the Windows sticker on the bottom (though it's getting hard to
read).

About a month ago it started giving the warning message that this copy of
Microsoft Word is "not genuine" when I open Word, and now it is saying that
it's going to mark all the files as "not genuine".

I do run an antivirus (McAfee), and several spyware and adware programs. I'm
not sure why I'm suddenly having a problem with this.

1. Can I fix it? (I don't have the CDs and can't afford to re-buy the
programs)

2. Is my system or data at risk if I don't fix it?

I'd be happy to try whatever is suggested, or provide more info if needed. I
did search for this issue, but found it only in different versions of
windows, and I can't find the tool to fix in this version of Word, so I am
posting a separate thread.

Thanks very much for any info!
trisha

 

[Donald]

its probably a false positive, go to office updates and run the validation
check see if it gives you another answer.
you can also try a repair on the office product but I would be careful since
it might ask for the disc you do not have.
another reason I have seen is vista is starting to fail and that causes
errors with office.
to get around that you might have to switch to open office till you can get
a copy of the disc to reinstall it.

 

[DL]

I would have expected that you would either have been provided with a set of
recovery disks or your Tosh has a hidden recovery partition.
Go to Tosh site, for your model, and look at the procedure for recovery to
factory spec. Which may enable you to create the recovery disks from the
hidden partition.
PS You purchased in 2008 and it was supplied with a copy of Word that was
allready out of date?

 

[Animenia]

Very simple solution.

Call Microsoft, explain the problem, They will ask you if you've use
the key on any other computers, You say "no" and they will solve th
issue with you over the phone in a minute.

/ An

 

[Swifty]

its probably a false positive, go to office updates and run the validation
check see if it gives you another answer.

That's what I did; got a second opinion. The initial prompt complained
that the key was one issued to large corporations, which is reasonable
as I work for IBM, my PC is owned by IBM, and the software was installed
by IBM.

I decided to ignore the problem, and eventually it went away.

I suspect that the problem was triggered (in my case) by an older
version of Office 2003 which I'd loaded from what I believed was valid
media (at the time). Later on, I loaded the official IBM version when it
became available, but that didn't include all of the components, but it
did get me the IBM key. I suspect that the components missing from the
IBM install were left on my PC, and that is what caused the prompts.

I don't know how I'd set about removing the surplus components, but it's
something that I'd prefer to ignore as long as it's causing no problems.
A bit like my appendix; I wouldn't like to remove that by myself,
either. I suspect the likelihood of a happy ending is about the same in
both cases.