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"About the activation; the OS only gathers your hardware unique identifiable spec to activate the OS. You DO NOT have to register or give out any personal info. Nada. This should answer your privacy problem."
I activated my Windows XP about a week ago and I was wondering if it's possible to activate it a second time?
As in, you want to reformat and reinstall? I've reinstalled XP several times on my rig for various reasons; the (re)activation has always been painless.
Ok that's good. Because I was wondering if you formatted your hard drive and tried to Activate Windows XP again, it would say something like "This copy has already been activated."
as long as your config is the same there should be no need to get a new activtion key...the os will auto activate just like it did before, reactivating is only a slightly bigger hassle if you chagned your system specs.
How about Office XP? Does it check your hardware or does it just only allow one install before requiring you to get a new code?
I ask because I installed XP Pro and Office XP yesterday. . . but I'm thinking I may go back and do it all over (for various reasons).
Thanks!
Hurin
I have done numerous reformats of WINXP. These were my problems.... I run raid 0 and have a third HD for storage of stuff I don't want to lose. Once I forgot to plug it back into its ide port and winxp wouldn't activate. I plugged it in and then it did. I had a raid drive go bad recently and received a replacement drive. I had to call up because XP wouldn't activate. They did not hassle me at all. They just asked if it was being installed on the same system and It Was. They then gave me this huge #@@$%^ number to enter.
Since then I have changed both hard drives out (WD to Seagate) and this time without a problem activating again. Go figure.
I actually went from a Abit KG7 raid board with a 1.4 gig processor to an Abit KR7A board with an AMD 1800+ without a hitch. It seems like the hard drives and I have heard that Network cards are big things. If you change those you may have to call Microsoft.
Just thought you might like to know my experiences in case you confront something similar. Good Luck.
If you have to reinstall Windows XP you normally will have to re-activate too. Well not anymore. Just copy wpa.dbl after you activated the first time. It is located in the system32 folder. Now if you reinstall Windows XP just copy the file back and you're up and running again.
My System:
Blizzard 360 Case
K7T 266 Pro2 Mother Board
XP 1900+ AMD CPU
Thermaltake Volcano 6CU+ HSF
Enermax 350 watt Whisper PS
256 Meg Micron PC2100 Ram
40 Gig Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 7200 RPM
Dual Boot 98SE and XP Pro
Sony 420GS 19" Moniter
NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Model 64 Pro
Avance AC'97 Audio
Artic Silverll
Idle 28C board 35C CPU Temp
Liteon 16X DVD
Liteon 24x10x40 CDRW
Teac Floppy
2976 USR Hardware Modem
Man I really hate this new activation thing!