HP runs slow after reformat - code purple?

[Fred]

Somebody hands me an old HP pavilion desktop that won't boot. I take a look and it appears that somebody bought windows XP pro and installed it over the XP Home that was originally on there. Because of this the restore partition wouldn't work anymore. It was still there, but F10 wouldn't do anything. There are no recovery disks either. What to do? What to do? So I happen to have restore disks for a different pavilion that came out the same year and I put disk #1 in there and I get an error saying that the CD's were meant for a different model. So I have a copy of Windows XP home that was used for a computer that the mobo died. I suspected that the original fuji hard drive was bad so I put a different used hard drive in the PC and proceed to to install XP home. I format the disk and then the computer started to run real slow. I mean real slow. During Windows install it said "windows is copying files" but it took like 6 or 7 hours. So I tried a different hard drive and still very slow. I Fdisked and then formated and started all over. It was taking 20 hours or more to install XP home on a blank drive. The PC originally came with 128mb of ram, so I pulled it out and put a 256mb stick in there. Still very slow. Well, I think when I put the recovery CD in from that other PC I think I tripped the code purple booby trap. When I got windows running after 20 hours with just XP home and no applications on it yet it said I was utilizing 100% CPU usage in the task manager performance tab. Anyway, I turned off the power, pulled out the power cord and pulled the cmos battery out. Held the on/off button in for 30 seconds and plugged it back in and low and behold the PC was humming along fine with no speed problems at all. I'm thinking that the HP booby traps are an amazing disservice to it's customers. Try to get the original restore disks on their website and it says "out of stock". Does anybody know how my restore disks knew that I was trying to intall on a different model? I mean which bat file or executable was making this decision?

 

[B00kWyrm]

I spent just a few minutes with Google and learned quite a bit about code purple...
Basically it is a system designed to prevent someone from installing OEM software on a system other than the original OEM machine.

In other words... piracy prevention.

From your description, I think you are in a grey area in what you wanted/tried to do (or accomplished).
HP and/or MS legal may have a different point of view.