reinstalling vista

[dcyphure]

i gave up trying to fix some of the things that suddenly quit working in vista for no reason whatsoever so think i'll reformat and be more careful

has anyone figured out for sure what exactly is the activation # limit for ultimate retail full?

i mean i know its limitless but like in xp you had to wait 120 days after you used up all your activations and had to call them up which is annoying.

i heard limit for vista was 2 and i dont know within what timeframe, i activated once and would kinda hate to waste an activation so early as i'm sure i'll be reformating alot just as i did with xp

[dasfast]

I don't know how many times , if any you are limited to reactivating on the same machine. I can tell you I have reinstalled and reactivated 4 times successfully since the end of January. I couldn't decide 32-bit or 64-bit. I finally decided on 32 for now....

Edited February 18, 2007 by dasfast

[dcyphure]

cool, this time i'll install then immediatly activate and image it before installing any drivers or updates

that way i can restore that activated image and have a clean install

[Makaveli213]

From what i remember hearing you can activate as many times as you want on the same machine. As long as you dont make any hardware changes that would constitute a new activation. Such as mobo and CPU. So you should be able to do it as many times as needed. But in total you should have only 3 total activations. So basically 3 changes.

[monsieur_henri]

I think that you will find Microsoft's activation policies a little more lenient than usual during the first 30 days of the public release. I installed Home Basic on a machine that went haywire twice, switched it to another machine WITHOUT activating until I could upgrade two hardware components, then re-activated. Although the activation call went to India and I had two crunch a set of 54 numbers back and forth, they were very polite and nice about it. The whole activation ordeal lasted about ten minutes. Don't be affraid of activation if you have a genuine copy!

[ScifiMike12]

Last week when I was installing Ultimate on my laptop I reformatted twice to get the feel of the OS. First try was to see how well the default drivers would perform and the second was when I decided to use vLite to get rid of some of the annoying features (UAC, security messages, etc.). I did these attempts on the same day so when I was reinstalling the second time the person on the phone was asking me for my product key because they had recorded another attempt earlier from that same key (obviously me). No really biggie though.

Mike.

[prx984]

This is good to know, as I'm weary about re-installing Vista on my laptop

Thanks for the info