XP OEM - Interesting conversation with MS employee

Wonder if you mean that activation will be denied under these circumstances?
How do you know this?
"Can vs May," or, "one thing I remember from the first grade."


Carey Frisch [MVP] wrote:
Q. "I suspect that means that it can be installed on a completely
new machine and will activate ok. Is that true?"

A. Not if its an OEM version....only a "Retail Version".


Last night I upgraded a customers machine with new motherboard, cpu,
memory, video card, netcard and soundcard. The only thing that was
the same was the HDD, dvd drive, tape backup and scsi card. I was
having trouble with the internet so I phoned MS to activate XP
again. After it activated I asked him what the limit is to hardware
change before XP won't activate. He said that XP oem has to always
remain on the same PC to be activated. In return I asked "what
constitutes the same PC?". He kept going around in circles and not
answering my question and just stating that it has to always remain
on the same PC. He never gave me a definition of what "same PC"
means. In the end I asked if it was more of a policy than a
technical limitation and he said "thank you for calling microsoft to
activate your software" and hung up!

I suspect that means that it can be installed on a completely new
machine and will activate ok. Is that true?



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