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A friend of mine got a pc with windows XP aready installed onto his system, i have had a lot of trouble with this problem with my girlfriends pc too.

How do i go about reinstalling XP (Starting Fresh) Using the same CD key as the old copy so i could use windows update?? is there ne way around this At ALL?? i mean i know its ok to do this and is not copywriting because the copy installed is legit. but can i find the same xp disk build??

or would a new copy have to be bought??

If you need to change the XP key on an existing XP installation, you can do it with this free tool: Download RockXP 4.0 beta - Retrieve and change your XP key, save your activation file, etc - Softpedia

No. My friend has a system which came with xp on it already. what im asking is if i can reinstall xp using the same build of xp (or newer) and use the cd key used on the xp build on the system?

You should, I think, always install XP using the CD and key that were provided together.
I might be misunderstanding your problem though.

there wasnt a cd provided.

You can use pretty much any cd key with and cd.

If it's a SP1 cd, you'll need an SP1 cd key...if it's an SP2 cd, you'll need an SP2 cd key.

This doesn't stop you upgrading to sp1/2...it just stops you installing them at the same time as you isntall windows which is a pain.

right ok, so as long as i use the same build as xp home already installed there shouldnt be a problem? and what about the WGA will it not pick it up as not genuine?