Saving Windows XP

[fetishdj]

From personal experience of Dell, I would take anything they say with a pinch of salt. There have been times when I am not sure they knew what they were talking about. Though in this case, it is more than likely the message from Microsoft had not filtered through to all the company...

As far as licensing goes, I have found that if you reinstall XP (say you get a new PC with Vista on it and have an XP install disc handy so you format the hard drive and install XP) all you generally have to do is contact the windows genuine service on telephone. This takes you to an automated service where you usually only have to tell the system how many computers you are running the software on. If it is one then you're fine. More than one and they will ask you to buy a new copy for each computer. Its generally quite painless (I've needed to do this a few times in the past year as the PC crashed horribly due to a virus and needed a complete rebuild...).

[Tufty]

As far as licensing goes, I have found that if you reinstall XP (say you get a new PC with Vista on it and have an XP install disc handy so you format the hard drive and install XP) all you generally have to do is contact the windows genuine service on telephone. This takes you to an automated service where you usually only have to tell the system how many computers you are running the software on. If it is one then you're fine. More than one and they will ask you to buy a new copy for each computer. Its generally quite painless (I've needed to do this a few times in the past year as the PC crashed horribly due to a virus and needed a complete rebuild...).

I've installed XP on 4 computers(my 2 desktops and 2 laptops) without a problem or being told that I needed to buy another copy, but I think I may run into problems if I installed it on a nother system

A complete rebuild due to a virus seems a bit harsh! I've been teaching computer engineers for the last 10 years and I've never heard of a complete rebuild because of a virus

Ah, but computers are only strange - be they running XP or Vista