Windows 7 Failing to Activate

I have been having problems activating my new work laptop. And due to being offsite, and a comedy of errors, the issue wasn’t resolved until today, once it had got the “expired” state.

This copy of Windows is not genuine
This copy of Windows is not genuine
You may be a victim of software counterfeiting
You may be a victim of software counterfeiting

The original activation error was 0xC004F074 and the event log was:

The client has sent an activation request to the key management service machine.
Info:
0xC0020017, 0x00000000, USO-AM-WDS-00:1688, ec1ed660-a0d5-4670-8fb1-663d1e70ba40, 2011/10/25 18:32, 0, 2, 27420, ae2ee509-1b34-41c0-acb7-6d4650168915, 25

Today my IS people provided a .bat that fixed it, that contained:

@echo off
slmgr.vbs /ckms
slmgr.vbs /ato

This needed to be run as administrator.
Reading the Microsoft help for slmgr.vbs shows the first command reset the Activation registry settings, and the second triggers activation.