[cradl]

Looking at buying Vista Ultimate I was wondering if I go OEM if I can put it on my desktop and down the road put it on my laptop, as long as I call Microsoft and tell them I had to replace my motherboard so I can get a new key. I know XP would allow you to install 3 times before telling you to call or as long as you made no major reconfigureations to your system. I've called about 3 times for XP and had no issues. Also I know you can look up the chart about what is the differance in version of vista but can anyone tell me from there own account on would you get Vista Home Pre. or Ultimate. I have allways had XP pro. I don't like home edition.

Thanks

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I may be wrong but if you only have a single license copy then you can only have it installed on one pc at a time. If you want to install it on a total different pc then you need to remove it from whatever pc currently has it installed. You might need to contact microsoft and tell them the situation so they can give you a new cd key so it will pass activation on the new pc. But you definatly can't have the same copy installed on two pc's at the same time.

[ViprXX]

I may be wrong but if you only have a single license copy then you can only have it installed on one pc at a time. If you want to install it on a total different pc then you need to remove it from whatever pc currently has it installed. You might need to contact microsoft and tell them the situation so they can give you a new cd key so it will pass activation on the new pc. But you definatly can't have the same copy installed on two pc's at the same time.

[cradl]

So there's not really a work around like in XP?

[warriorscot]

The OEM vista licenses are non-transferable even if you wanted to MS probably wouldn't allow you to switch it to another computer even if you stopped using the old one. To make it transferable you need to get one of the liscenses for PC builders.

[cradl]

So what is the name of that edition, how much does that cost and where can I buy it?

[warriorscot]

They changed it round, they used to have two variations of liscence for system builders, one for upgradahloics and one for OEM builders one was transferable one was not but both were roughly the same price. What they seem to have done lately is chuck the differentiation and now they just have OEM and Retail, Retail is tied to the user and allows 10-20 activations before you need to call for activation, OEM is tied to the hardware and you would need to call to get it authenticated but you can actually sell that to someone else with the PC in question which you can't do with retail again if you moved it to another piece of hardware which MS would be within their rights not to activate being on new hardware but they would probably just activate as they don't usually bother to investigate it.

Home Premium has all the things that your everyday user will use at home, Ultimate has some of the corporate features on top like bit locker and a few crappy games like hold em poker.

To be honest if you have XP Pro and are happy with it I wouldn't bother getting Vista now you have kinda missed the band wagon its probably easier to wait till the next release of windows in a 1.5 years time. MS are moving to a more regular schedule of windows releases so expect a new windows every 2 to 3 years rather than 5ish like XP. January 2010 is the expected release date for windows 7 and if I was building a new system I would just wait it out.

[cradl]

Thanks, but the only thing I have is everytime they release a new version like everything else is you have to wait a year or at least till SP1 comes out for it to be worth buying. They always let the public do there testing for them. So unless I get a new system I think I will wait. Unless I find it cheep so I can play around with it. The only reason is I do fixes for family and some friends and they are starting to get vista and I'm not to familular with it so it would be nice to play around with it.