Bill said:
Dual boot two copies of XP with same license? Then buy a [cheaper]
Vista upgrade?
Can you use one license to dual boot two copies of XP so that you
could upgrade one to Vista by purchasing the cheaper upgrade
version?
When I say "can" what I really mean is it legit to do that.It's not even legit (according to the strict language of the EULA) to dual
boot the same license of Windows XP...
Let Microsoft's own Activation process determine your legitimacy,
that was what that was created for and seems to be the authority in
this.
Install your orignal XP cd on a second partition on your original
machine.
Use your original XP key for the second installation.
When it asks if you want to activate it now say "Sure!, make my day."
It will begin interrogating your machine, certain that you are stealing
their
software and installing it on an illegitimate machine and now hunting
for
the evidence to prove it...
But at every step in the activation process it finds that you are NOT
installing this on a different machine, the ethernet card matches, the
hard drive matches, the bios matches, the video card matches, the
memory matches... damn it can't find any evidence that anything is
different to prove you are stealing...
And the activation grudgingly says yes your installation of XP is
accepted and you are perfectly legitimate.
Actually at one time there WAS a Microsoft web page that explained
exactly how you were to do this process, even several different times
on the same machine, saying that there might be perfectly good
reasons for you to want to do this, using different setups or having
different drivers. Unfortunately I didn't save a copy of that web page
and a couple of times when I tried to find it again I was unsuccessful.
It might still be out there. If you find it please send me a copy of
it.
How the Vista upgrade process goes with this? I don't know yet.
But I'd bet enough money to make it interesting that this will work
and be blessed by their activation process as perfectly legitimate.
