Changing a computer and Microsoft Windows Activation

[jwmorrice]

I recently made some major changes to one of my desktops. I upgraded the motherboard, the cpu, and the video card. As well, I had an additional hard drive added and took out the old sound and fax cards. I fully expected to have to phone MS to activate Windows and that that would turn out to be a fruitless endeavour. However, to my great surprise, nothing of the sort was necessary. I'm happy about that but it left me wondering, just what does one have to do to get Mr. Bill on one's case? Is MS that worried about driving customers to Apple or Ubuntu or is it mostly trying to maintain the pool of potential Windows 7 customers?

jwm

 

[onehunglow]

Do it all the time for myself and customers as well. Most often the activation is via an automatic service. Never a problem. When in contact with an actual person i get the same result.

I think there has been a lot of hype about this in the last few years.

Information collected by MS when you update will eventually tell them if the software is on multiple systems.

I am concerned what will happen to those running OS's that require activation when the software is no longer supported. What do you do then?

 

[Horney_Senior]

I am concerned what will happen to those running OS's that require activation when the software is no longer supported. What do you do then?

Upgrade! That's why they stop the support.

 

[Anynym]

IIRC, the EULA allows transfer of the license, but only infrequently (and there may also be an absolute limit on the number of times you may do so, but I'm not certain). As long as there is no reason to believe anything funny is going on, there should be no problem.

 

[onehunglow]

Upgrade! That's why they stop the support.

I have about 200 clients at the moment. About 50 use win98 or prior and almost all of the rest use XP. They likely will be using XP forever if they can. With most i have ghosted their HD to a backup so activation won't be a problem while they have the same system but most new clients have not protected themselves or have no recovery or installation disks. Most also have no desire to upgrade either their system or OS.

While rare, there are some older versions of XP that will allow you to move the HD from one system to another and still work.