Windows XP question

[ajbera]

One of the things that irks me about Vista is that it supposedly monitors your hardware, and isn't friendly if you frequently change the configuration of your system. I often swap out hardware, and since I have a bad track record with hard drives, I have to reinstall my OS at least once a year.

I've been using a less-than-legit copy of Win XP for the past few years. Now with the authentication procedures in place I have to jump through hoops to get SP2 and critical updates. If I bite the bullet and buy a copy of XP, will I run into any problems if I swap components and reinstall Windows from time to time? Or is it pretty liberal in regards to reusability?

[Asher]

Re: Windows XP question

Originally posted by ajbera
One of the things that irks me about Vista is that it supposedly monitors your hardware, and isn't friendly if you frequently change the configuration of your system. I often swap out hardware, and since I have a bad track record with hard drives, I have to reinstall my OS at least once a year.

I've been using a less-than-legit copy of Win XP for the past few years. Now with the authentication procedures in place I have to jump through hoops to get SP2 and critical updates. If I bite the bullet and buy a copy of XP, will I run into any problems if I swap components and reinstall Windows from time to time? Or is it pretty liberal in regards to reusability?

XP is actually more rigid than Vista is in terms of hardware swapping. You don't even need to reinstall Windows if you swap out things such as your motherboard + CPU and they support different instruction sets (eg, new CPU supports SSE4 and old one didn't).

[snoopy369]

HDD Images FTW!

Seriously, from what I recall, you might run into minor problems, but they are fixable with a call to MS. How long those take, I don't know.

[Aeson]

I like to swap things between computers rather regularly. Even though I have 4 valid copies of XP, I've had to make around 10 of those calls. In my experience those calls can take from anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple hours.

It's just a waste of time and tedius input, recital, input of numbers. (Hope you get someone without a thick accent...) They never even seem to question the validity of the call.

[Dinner]

I'm happy MS listened to consumers on this point. I recall threads here and else where fretting over Windows giving them **** over routine hardware changes.