Feiyan, I'm visiting friends out of the country that are also AW'ers (Sementawy and Fenton) and Fenton is having exactly teh same problem! His isn't a dell though, not sure where he got it from. He's never had a problem with it, but just about two weeks ago now it started saying his Microsoft Windows whatever was not "authentic". Says it every few minutes, on every start up, whenever he walks past it. Very annoying! There isn't much he can do about it since his pc is past warranty now, but what you need to do is contact Dell, not Microsoft. It's not a Microsoft problem, it's Dell selling you a pc without an authenticated version of MS.

Chances are, it's not an illegal rip off ,but a group of pc's that were sold that didn't go through some weird serial number process. Either way, it's Dell's fault, and Dell's job to fix it immediately. I'd call them up and throw a fit, insist on them replacing it or fixing the problem asap. Dell knows better and should be under stricter supervision than to let that happen, being America's no. 1 pc selling company and all. *last i heard anyway*