My laptop did a Thermal Shutdown. Which is good to preserve my hardware, but bad because I don’t know why the hardware is getting too hot. The cooling past was replaced and no issues for about a week or two. Then again a Thermal Shutdown. It was time for further inspection.

We planned a pickup and a swap-out laptop. The temporary laptop would be the same model. We swapped the harddisk and booted. Windows reported some changes but started without issues. We were unaware of what had happened.

HP has multiple configurations with the same model name. The display, display adapter, wifi adapter, processor and memory are different. I did the geekbench test and the results show a slight less performance by the swap-out laptop. (my laptop vs swap-out laptop) Hope mine is fixed soon. I mostly miss the 1600 x 900 display.

Back to what happened to Windows. I noticed the background of the start menu and login screen had changed. In the settings app I got notified my Windows was not activated. On the activation tab was an error:

Error code: 0xC004C008
Error description: The activation server reported that the product key has exceeded its unlock limit.

No more activation with my key. I requested a new key on my MSDN downloads page and was back in business.

I’m happy to see that swapping hardware did not force me to do a complete re-install. The swap-out and reconfiguration took about 30 minutes. You’ll need an active internet connection for downloading the drivers. Easy does it.

[Update] No repro, no issue. Got my laptop back with (again) new cooling past “installed”. The thermal shutdown did not occur during testing, so there was nothing the service company could do.