What's a good lock box ??

James Wilkinson fedora at aprilcottage.co.uk
Tue Nov 28 13:31:13 UTC 2006


Timothy Murphy wrote:
> You (or maybe someone else) keeps saying this,
> but does one _have to_ "authenticate" Windows?

No. By default, you get a "grace period" of thirty days, and then you
will need to activate (or reinstall) Windows XP if you want to keep using
it. But you don't *have* to activate it!

I understand that some PCs come with Windows pre-activated, and there are
some versions that don't need activating at all. For example, there is or
was a version which would only work on Dell PCs, which didn't need
activating. This one would check that it was running on a machine with a
suitable Dell BIOS: machines sold with different OSes would have a
different BIOS installed.

You certainly *could* activate Windows XP over the phone -- I did that
when it was still fairly new. Microsoft hasn't changed the page in
question:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/evaluation/features/activation.mspx .

Activation didn't apply for previous versions of Windows.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
E-mail:     james@ | I learnt the rules of rugby. There is only one rule.
aprilcottage.co.uk | "Skip it by any means necessary".
                   |     -- "Nix"




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