Re: replacing motherboard questions

augie wrote:
I have computer with a mother board from an HP Vectra VL400 with a 1000 meghertz Intel Celeron and a 200G harddrive. With an authentic XP home operating system. No disks, I bought it used. But I have the needed home edition codes. Slow but I like XP. I just bought a used Gateway E-2000 with a Pentium 4 and a very small, very noisy hard drive, and all the disks for Window 2000. Much faster than my old one. I would like to move my hard drive with XP Home into the Gateway E-2000. How do I do that? I tried just moving the harddrive into the Gateway and that did not work? any suggestions??

The Windows XP user license for the HP is very likely an OEM license that does not authorize you to use the Operating System (OS) on another computer. Many name brand computers come with OSs that are customized to work with a narrow range of computer model numbers and will refuse to work with motherboard models they are not configured for anyway. Some OEM licenses are supplied on separate media (like the ones you describe for the Gateway), but some have software in a hidden hard drive partition for restoring the computer to the same software and data configuration it was in when shipped or delivered to the end user. The non-transferable OEM license limitations probably apply to the Windows 2000 for the Gateway as well.

Use of the larger hard drive in the Gateway would require the installation of the Windows 2000 OS on the larger hard drive or the installation of Windows XP under a different end user license than the one that came with the HP. If HP was utilizing removable media as the original owners avenue to recover a damaged OS your Windows XP OS would become unrecoverable.
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