Hi,
I have just activated my product key and all went fine, no problemo.
Just out of curiosity, if someone noted down my product key, would they be
able to activate it on their windows xp and then download updates?
Cheers
Gav
Technically, no: All they would have to do is lie to the Activation
person when they would be required to perform a telephone activation.
However, such an act would obviously be a flagrant violation of
Microsoft's anti-piracy measures.
ALL Microsoft licenses can legally be activated on ONLY ONE
workstation at a time, by the owner of the license.
If the license is an OEM license, it may be activated on only ONE
workstation, period. However, it may be activated as many times as
needed for installation or hardware change on the SAME machine.
Microsoft Retail licenses may be installed and activated on as many
machines as you want, as long as they are only installed on ONE
machine at a time, and NOT installed on ANY others.
Some Office Retail licenses allow you to install and activate Office
on a both desktop and a laptop.
Some Windows Retail licenses do not require activation by the
end-user, since they are activated at the factory.
Some Windows Retail licenses (Volume licenses) do not require
activation at all.
All Windows XP licenses are effectively renewed every 120 days, when
the activation records are erased from Microsoft's servers (the next
time you activate, it will be as if it were the very first time you
activated the license, and an Internet activation will almost always
be successful.)
Donald L McDaniel
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