Have to buy XP again?

[Goofy Newfie]

I am in the process of building a new system, keeping hard drives and peripherals, but replacing mobo, processor, pwr. supply, memory, etc.... . A friend told me that with the new hardware config, I would have to purchase a new copy of XP Home, as the one I bought previously would not be possible to activate on the new configuration. Is this the case? Is there a way around this?

 

[Rick]

You will not have to buy XP again. You will need reactivate it over the phone.

Tell the Microsoft representive you upgraded your system and they will issue you a new, geniune activation key.

 

[Goofy Newfie]

Thanks for your reply. That means I have an extra $150 to spend on other stuff.

 

[lowman]

That's correct - I just did the same thing about 8 months ago - and it went relatively well, which I did not expect (dealing with MS is rather painful sometimes.)

 

[poertner_1274]

Yes it is, but for some reason they actually help you quickly when it comes to problems like getting a new activation code.

 

[Subsane]

I had to do that as well....The support lady I spoke was awsome....and sounded very sexy

 

[e-Willem]

Hello,

I had a sort of same problem, I my hard disk gave S.M.A.R.T.-errors, saying: "back-up and replace drive". So I bought a new harddisk, put the old one on slave and the new one as master in my system. I installed XP on the new harddisk but when I run: "oobe/msoobe /a" I get a message that my windows/system is already activated.

And when I use windows-update I get the message that my OS isn't correctly activated (or something like that).

Now I have a new key received, but how can I reactivate my XP, considering that "oobe/msoobe /a" doesn't give me any option of activating.