Windows 8 activation error: DNS name does not exist

Last night I finally installed Windows 8 RTM on my laptop. Having tried and enjoyed the developer’s preview, everything was thumbs up until I tried to activate the software and prove it genuine. The process didn’t ask me for the 5x5 digit key (seemed like it already had one) and it presented the following error message:



After searching the Web for a solution, I found out here that this might happen when you get your installation media from MSDN or Technet and try to install and activate outside your corporate network. The activation wizard  by default will look for a Key Management Service (KMS) host on your internal network. It will not try to activate using the internet to reach Microsoft Activation servers.

I tried the suggested solution, which is to open an elevated CMD prompt and run the following command, as shown below::



It still didn’t work, reporting an invalid key error. My installation media is not illegal or counterfeit software, so I edited the file “slmgr.vbs” and examined the script content. There was an option to uninstall the existing product key:



After executing the script with the “upk” option, I simply pressed the “Activate” button again, it asked for my activation key and worked like a charm:



Hope this helps!