timsart

Thanks Ponch. Good article. Cover some points I had not understood before. The part about WPA considering any further changes after an activation to be part of the same hardware upgrade may be where the loophole occurred as I read it. "But Microsoft recognises that machines do get upgraded. If, following the activation after setup, you do not need to contact the activation center for 120 days (any changes you make during this time being seen as acceptable when the system boots), then the sheet is swept clean and you can start again using the current hardware as the new baseline to make more changes. If you get a new computer, you are entitled to remove Windows XP from the one that is being junked, and install the same Windows XP on the new machine — but you will have to do the reactivation by a voice call and explain (unless, as was just mentioned, 120 days have passed since the activation was last performed)." That sort of explains why I was not flagged for activation after changing out the mother board and processor. (Since I'd just reactivated less than 120 days back over the hard drive IDE channel change.) I'll have to keep that in mind down the road. Thanks again.

Well I have an odd issue. My computer was hit by a power surge at the end of June. This fried the power supply and somehow also fried IDE channel one, but IDE channel 2 worked. So, I switched the IDE boot drive to second channel, removing a Super disk drive from the system altogether. This left the boot hard drive and a DVD RW as slave on IDE channel 2 and a second hard drive on SATA channel 1 and a new generic floppy drive to replace the Super Disk drive. After doing this, I was required to re-activate the install. This worked fine with MS's online system. Now here's the odd part. This weekend I finally had time to change out the whole system since the motherboard was on its last legs anyway. I now have a new MB, CPU, ram, etc., cloned my boot hard drive to a new, larger SATA drive. Only the DVD RW and floppy are the same. I fired up the computer and loaded all new drivers for motherboard. Everything went very smoothly. What is weird is that I have not been prompted to re-activate. I even did all the patch Tuesday updates yesterday. Still no re-activation notice. System: XP Pro (generic OEM) service pack 2 Old hardware was a an Athlon XP64 3200+ and gigabyte MB (socket 939) New hardware is an Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 and ECS Elitegroup 945GZT-M board and new ram. Nothing even similar about the 2 systems' MB & CPU. Anyone have any ideas why I was not "blessed" with having to re-activate XP? (An aside, Adobe made up for this weird blessing. My CS3 Photoshop and Illustrator caused me 50 minutes on hold and 5-10 minutes with a supervisor to fix it's activation silliness.)