Thread: Wow, I finally understand all the bitching about the M$ empire

http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripelin...board_rep.html

Yeh, this is a really old article, but it's actually news to me, just because I never looked into it much. It's probably been discussed here before.

That is complete and utter bullshit. I would say it borders on criminal. An O/S should not be tied to a machine (or motherboard) any more than any other piece of software.

Good thing I never paid for Vista...

If you call in the activation on the phone, it will still work.
BTW, this is not a new policy for Vista. It has been this way since Windows 95 and maybe earlier, that was just when I had to start knowing the M$ licensing system. They were only able to enforce it legally prior to Windows XP. This lead to a lot of piracy. With Windows XP and Product Activation, they created a technical way to enforce it as well. The pirates, of course adapted, but it cut down on the amount of piracy significantly. If you want to not be tied to this system, you must buy a retail version of the OS for your homebuilt PC. If you buy a big name PC, you are not affected by this if your board needs replacement because it died a tragic death. This only affects people who are using an OEM version of the OS and upgrade a motherboard. But like I said, call it in and they will usually take care of it for you. Remember, you are not buying an operating system, you are buying a license to use their operating system.
If you do not like their rules for their operating system, you are certainly free to use any of the alternatives. Personally, I like the Gentoo flavor of Linux, but there are many distributions of that and there is always Unix or you can buy an Apple.

As Gumby says... this is old news... This is generally not unique to the operating system either. Most preinstalled copies of Office also are supposed to only be used on the machine that they came installed on. The key can be used to reinstall the product on other machines, but by the word of the license, you're not supposed to. My copy of Vista has gone through 3 motherboards, 3 processors, 2 GPUs, 2 Sound Cards, a plethora of HDs. The only constant has been the case itself. For me, the Vista activation is a bit of a hassle, but calling in via phone, they've never harassed me about having used the key on multiple systems. I explain that I replaced my motherboard in the machine, and they happily handed me a new activation code.

I have had a similar experience.

I have migrated my XP Pro liscense through about 5 or 6 machines and my Vista through 2. When I called them and said "Yeah I got a new [part] and reinstalled the OS" they just give me a new activation code. It takes about 3 minutes.

Not so bad... But understandable on their part. Piracy is a big problem; of course if you can secure it, the pirates will crack it.

The only time they will give you a hard time is if you're running the same license on 2 machines simultaneously... As long as it's installed on 1 functioning system, you're fine. If I were to build a new system with the old motherboard I took out, I'd purchase a new license.