Re: Moving XP around - and back to it's original hardware

No ideas from anyone?




"Andy" <andy@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ukEZ0dkhGHA.3296@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
We are a small company who make real time control systems. Part of the
system is a real time operating system on non pc hardware, but we also
supply pc's as an integral part of the system. Without them, the control
sysytem is useless. The hardware usually gets shipped to the customer well
before we have finished working on the software. There is nothing we can
do to get round this.

The pc's all have removable drives. All our pc's have identical hardware.
We go to great lengths to ensure this. We do not buy the "flavour of the
month" from a local shop. We build them ourselves and use long life
components such as motherboards, etc.
When we used Win2K, we used to keep the drives, and put them in another
pc. The hardware was identical, so we could continue working. When it was
time to commission the control system (sometimes months from the shipping
date) our engineer would take the discs with him, put them back in the
original hardware and carry on as usual. Everything worked.

Now with XP, we can't do this. I have created images (they are all
different) for our pc's, and used sysprep to create a base image. This
image is used to create a new pc, and gets a valid key during
installation. We buy XP from an authorized MS distributor. Now, if we move
the discs to another supposedly identical pc, XP will detect the hardware
change (see here for an interesting paper on this
http://www.licenturion.com/xp/fully-licensed-wpa.txt) and then we have 3
days to re-activate. Of course, this will happen again once we take the
discs out and reunite them with their original hardware.
Now I don't want to keep phoning MS and explaining what we are doing. I'm
sure that after a while, they would get very suspicious. However I do want
to keep the flexibility of what we do now, whilst not breaking any EULA's.
Does anyone know if using a Volume License would help? We could do this. I
know that these installations do not require activation, but what about a
hardware change? Do they still complain about this? The only thing about a
volume license is that we would wish to transfer the ownership to the
final customer. We don't want to keep this. Can I do this? Or is this a
question for some other forum or newsgroup? As an aside, what about XP
Embedded? I can't see that an XP image for a set top box would need
activating!
Anyway, sorry for the long post, but any ideas are welcome.




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