If it turns out the original OS wasn’t Win7 as you were led to believe, you can upgrade
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The drivers listed on dell.com are all Vista Business 32 or Win7Pro drivers,, this laptop was built after XP was discontinued as an OEM option...
Will contact Dell for recovery disk ... don’t see how it would help as I loaded from a genuine win7prosp1/64 recovery disk for “latitude” and it wasn’t a burned copy... funny thing is it ALWAYS said “activated” in control panel> all control panel items > system ...
It is possible that Dell changed slightly the OEM version that they ship. I faintly recall that OEM releases are tied to the BIOS of the manufacturer, so an OEM DVD of Windows from HP won't work on Dell or Acer... The idea of contacting Dell and getting a recovery DVD is the best so far.
I hope you realize that OEM windows install disks can only be activated once. That is probably why your activation doesn’t work - the key has already been used. You can install/reinstall from the OEM disk many times, but once the OEM key is activated and linked to a motherboard serial number, it can never be activated again on another computer (unless you also transferred the motherboard).
Also, Dell uses different variations of their OEM install disks, so if someone told you that all Dell OEM disks are the same and work with any windows key or motherboard version, they were wrong. So if you order a replacement OEM disk using the service tag number, you should get the correct disk to go with the key for your motherboard (assuming the MB was never replaced).
Now having said that, if the original OS was 32 bit and you have loaded the machine up with more than 4 Gb of memory, you can’t access that extra memory until you upgrade to 64 bit. So you may have to buy a new 64 bit OS anyway. A new OEM Win7 pro 64 bit disk costs about $135. Retail install disks cost a bit more, but the licenses can be activated multiple times and are not tied to the motherboard, but to the customer.