How does a user change the computer's company name?

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J Schewe Posted: Sun, Mar 30 2008 10:12 PM

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I have gotten really annoyed by programs that I use always keep saying that I'm from the company Hewlett-Packard when really I just bought the computer from them... Is there someway to change what company the computer is used by?

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tezfair replied on Mon, May 26 2008 12:02 PM

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Most of the apps you have installed will have picked up the name from the registry and embedded itself into itself so they may be impossible to remove, but the first place to start is a seach of the registry for 'Hewlett-Packard', especially under the 'setup' secftion. I can't remember off the top of my head where it is, but as a tip, rather than deleteing every entry, modify them, say adding a '-test' on the end. once you see that company names change, you can refine the search and delete Hewlett-Packard-test'.

I prefer to modify incase I stop something from working and can't go back.

Tez 

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J Schewe replied on Mon, May 26 2008 5:49 PM

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Yeah, I should have thought of that 2 months ago...

 Anyways, here's what I've found:

All the programs I've tested changed their licensed company name when I changed the Registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\RegisteredOrganization

But I also found registries like this, that look specific to certain products:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Automap\8.0\USA\RegCompany (Microsoft Streets and Trips 2001, specific to current user)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\UserInfo\CompanyName (Microsoft Office 2008, specific to current user)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\AutoMap\8.0\USA\RegCompany (Microsoft Streets and Trips 2001)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\.NETFramework\v2.0\Help\0x0409\{F848A463-F1BC-426e-ACF6-E5754B9D7E1D}\Registration\RegisteredOrganization (.Net Framework 2.0.50727)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSDN\8.0\Help\LanguageNeutral\{B9994D8D-0F32-40ba-8E6A-409C81B9EE62}\Registration\RegisteredOrganization (MSDN 8.0)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Help\LanguageNeutral\{221CD402-A57E-40D5-8341-46B37DB01B58}\Registration\RegisteredOrganization (Visual Studio 9.0)

However when I looked in these programs they didn't show anything about registered companies.