My family has owned this desktop for six years now. It's running Windows Vista Home Premium, Service Pack 2, and it's been registered and running fine until this morning.
Today I was prompted with a dialogue box to activate Windows, and my desktop background was replaced with a black screen with "Windows Vista (TM) / Build 6002 / This copy of Windows is not genuine" in the bottom-right corner. All of my system restore points are gone.
The computer seems to be running fine, but the warning says that the OS needs to be registered "today", so I'm not sure what will happen otherwise.
When I clicked to activate my copy of Windows, a prompt stated that the activation key was invalid for registration, and offered a link to "contact the Hewlett-Packard Company to solve this problem", so here I am.
There are plenty results for this issue online, but they all seem to suggest reinstalling Windows from the disc and storing all of our data elsewhere (we don't have a drive large enough to handle that), or using a system restore point (which, as stated earlier, have vanished).
I would like to know what my options are. Thanks.