Vista and homebuild upgrades

After reading some other posts and information on other websites the EULA on Vista seems much more restrictive than past incarnations of Windows.

As a pc builder my question is: I have legitimately installed (well I believe so at time of posting tho I may be proved wrong!) OEM Vista HP (x64) on my homebuilt machine, if I upgrade my machine say, change the processor or motherboard is that seen as transferring my copy of Vista to a new machine?

I dare say there are a lot of people out there who might want to upgrade a branded pc at some point, which will probably have an OEM version on, who may have the same question.

 

vista knows what hardware it was installed on, and yet at the same time, people often do upgrade pc hardware.

ill explain how xp handles this --> completely idiotically.

i took apart my pc once to rma the motherboard. upon putting in the exact same model motherboard, windows decided that my copy of xp was not legit because of a change in hardware. a phone call remedied this.

however, i also installed xp on my new laptop, and it doesn't care in the least.

i would expect vista to deal with the issue in a similar manner. i have actually heard stories of random locking up due to supposedly changed hardware that was obviously not. but vista should NOT lock you out for changing hardware, and if it does, i will admit that the phone call was very quick, painless, and got me unlocked within minutes.

in case i wasn't clear- you are well within your right and microsoft is happy to let you move your license of vista to a new machine or for you to change your hardware. it might require a simple phone call in case your computer locks out as an anti-piracy measure.

 

I had to reactivate XP a couple of times in the past due to upgrades myself and once because I just plugged something back in in a different place. But I was just wondering at what point does an upgrade become a different machine in the eyes of Microsoft. A new case, a new processor, a new motherboard, a new graphics card etc etc each upgrade by themselves are fairly minor but by the time you've done even three of them you've got quite a different machine.


I do agree tho the phonecalls are very quick and simple..

 

http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/activation_faq.mspx
scroll down toward page end

cheers ...

 

ah interesting!.. thanks qhn! I had searched around on their website but had never come across that page before..