Just to muddy the water...
My OEM computer came from Computer Renaissance with XP Home installed.
I subsequently upgraded that machine to XP Pro, and moved the OEM copy of
XP Home to an older machine with completely different hardware, motherboard,
etc.
I then built a new system, trashed the older machine, and transferred the
OEM copy of XP Home to the new system. In both moves, MS gave their blessing
via re-activation.
This was a clone system,of course,not a "large OEM".
I didn't know any better, and assumed that this was the way things worked. I
paid good money for the XP Home disk, so why should I have to trash it when
the computer is no longer in service.
I called MS prior to the initial re-install and they had no problem with
this scenario.
If you read the OEM license, you can get even further confused.
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***********
MS considers the MB in an OEM computer to be the "life and sole" of the
machine, and if it fails under warranty, the license lives on ONLY with a
warranty replacement MB of the same type. If you take "any" MB out of an OEM
machine and put one in with "better features" MS considers it a new OEM
machine, and a new OEM machine requires a new license. (New license can be
any type...) If you take the OEM license out of the "entire" old machine the
replacement machine will DEFINITELY be a new machine for OEM definition
purposes...
OEM licenses are not as well "defined" to the general public as the standard
licenses and are generally misunderstood... There are special rules that
make them cheaper for the OEMs... These rules come at a cost to your
eventual rights to the use software...
One "other" (less important) reason they use to support this position is
that the OEM is required to support the machine. If the customer, (or
someone else) replaces the MB with a different type, the MS position is that
the OEM should NOT be required to support something they did not provide. I
can see why that is reasonable... (Note that this support is NOT required to
be free... BUT it must be offered in good faith...) Anyone questioning this,
please refer to the MS OEM site for particulars... (Registration,
Membership, and Password required.) They had a great WEB seminar last Feb'05
about this (archived for viewing).
PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
visit our download web page at:
http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml
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