Reinstall XP, could you lose the upgrading right for Vista?

I have a question: if a thinkpad runs on XP downgraded from Vista (with Vista's stickers on bottom of machine and palmrest), and when you send it to depot for repair and they had to reimage/reinstall the OS, so that it will still run on XP, will they have kept the Vista license key in the machine? In other words, could it happen that they installed XP, but you no longer have the right to upgrade to Vista? Please bear with me--I am very ignorant how this downgrading while keeping the upgrading license/right works

 

never heard about this rights lost......... Vista Business and Ultimate license entitle you to run either XP pro or Vista Business/Ultimate on your machine, you can switch between the different OS depending on your mood.... also Lenovo don't touch your hdd or anything, they don't care about softwares.... which also means that they don't support software issues either.

 

My suggestion to you would be if you're sending it in for service and the drive is not the problem, I'd pull it. Then you don't have to be concerned whether they'll format the drive.

If you've bought a machine with the XP downgrade, you've in essence purchased a machine with Vista that Lenovo has kindly downgraded to XP because Vista includes the right to downgrade to XP. The key belongs to you since you bought it. You may upgrade to Vista at any time using the key on you machine, provided you've got the correct media.

Have you made your XP recovery media yet and did you get a set of Vista recovery discs? If you use those, they're already activated and should give you no trouble.