For sure!  There were people in the UK she could have taken her notebook to, it's just that mother was coming for a visit anyhow, and I suggested that she could wait until I could take a look at it... which she did.  So yeah, the "expensive service" bit was just a bit of tongue-in-cheek.

It's funny, really, my mother was living here with mrs starkers and I, until she decided that she'd like to go visit her sister in Coventry.... and a chance meeting with dad's old business partner.  Next thing we know they're coming here to get married (dad had been gone 7 years by then), only to return to the UK to live,  So yeah, due to the costs of international travel, their visits are pure gold because they're not as frequent as perhaps we'd all like.

Yeah, similar issues when Office 2007 came out. Manufacturers would install the "Trial" version on it and you could NEVER install the full retail ( or VLK ) version even if you removed the trial. It would eventually crash on you after the 60 ( or whatever ) days.

The only way around it was a format / reinstall of OS and NOT put the damn Trial back on.

Yeah, when my mother discovered the trial was useless, she rang HP in the UK and was told if she took her notebook in they would activate the Office trial for something like 30 - 35 pounds. 

Hehe, let's just say that if you've never heard a 76 y/o woman profusely use a range of cuss words, just imagine how shocked the HP guy was when she unleashed a barrage of expletives on him.

Um, I'll just use the abbreviated, polite translation: "Thirty five pounds to activate a trial version?  You must either be joking or out of your cotton picking mind."  Now I wouldn't say that my mother makes it a habit of using profanities, in fact, quite the opposite as she is generally gentile and lady-like.... but she does not take kindly to people trying to rip her off.