Just before last Christmas holidays, I faced with a unfortunately common problem: my laptop started to have many problems about almost everything, from Ethernet connectivity to system administration, and so on...
All this happened suddenly without any advice! 
After performing a disk check,I found that many files were corrupted, included some system files. The final decision was to fix the Windows XP installation. And here comes the problem: my laptop has no installation CD!
Really, no installation CD! My system administrator told me that this is now a common way used by laptop manufacturers. No installation CD, ... but a recovery partition from within at boot time it is possible to re-install everything. What a good news!
But the bad news was that the re-installation turns the PC as the original state as just bought, i.e. with nothing installed, no data, no configuration, nothing! Just a brand new installation!
What a mess!!!
I just wanted to fix the current installation! But this seems to be not possible with this method!
After googling a bit, I found the solution: use a standard XP installation CD (perhaps a illegitmate copy?) which will allow you to recover the current installation, or reinstall a new one over it. This need the usage of a product-key which is not your own.
If you will let thinks so, this product-key will turn your installation in a not-genuine one, thus no online updates, and many other problem. If you want to revert the produc-key to your original one, all you need is the Microsoft's Official Windows Product Key Update Tool (for changing keys only).
Now every thing is ok! 
References:
How to Change Windows XP Product Key or Serial and Registration Information
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