"Time to activate Windows"...Is it a virus? UPDATED [View all]

[Baitball Blogger]

I first saw this message pop up from the icon bar several months ago. About a month earlier I had the laptop at the shop where a new harddrive was installed and software files also reinstalled. I figured the store had forgotten to activate the windows, so I took it back and they had it corrected even before I was half way home.

But the message came up again just now. Like the last time, I lost my Windows wallpaper. The background was replaced with a black background.

This time around, however, instead of responding to the pop up, I went through the virus scanning and registry clean-up and found several problems on a thumbdrive that was connected to the laptop. On the thumbdrive were included backups of old files from the Download folder. I have since cleaned everything up and reestablished the wallpaper.

UPDATE: The warning came back on! It said that I needed to activate windows. That the trial period has expired!

I have Windows 7.