Some clarifications.
The EULA has nothing to do with your obligations as a reseller/system builder. The EULA governs the use of the software by the end-user (or the PUR if you are using volume licensing).
What you found is not a EULA... it's the System Builder Agreement. That is what the system builder agrees to do if they want to resell our product as a system builder, and they can view that on the OEM site listed below.
For the rules a reseller/system builder must follow, we have an entire website devoted to it. It wasn't too hard to find. Go to the page (
http://oem.microsoft.com or
http://www.microsoft.com/oem), on the left click on Licensing (I know, I know... we should have made the link say FluffyMonkeys just to make it harder!), then go to Licensing Overview.
The entire top half of the page is devoted to system builder licensing requirements, FAQs, general information, COA information, and licensing newsgroup links (including, yes, the agreement you linked to above).
Tough eh? Well under 10 minutes to find.
Do I find it disturbing that you could call Microsoft, ask a technical support engineer LICENSING questions and not get an official answer? Not at all. We have entire teams devoted to licensing... and those people don't resolve technical issues.
Do you call your ISP, push the button for tech support, and then bitch about billing and expect results?
As far as the ORIGINAL question goes, if you go into the FAQs on the incredibly complex-to-navigate site I listed earlier, there is an entire FAQ on the subject of replacement parts constituting a new computer.
For the browsing-impaired:
http://oem.microsoft.com/script/contentpage.aspx?pageid=551163
FYI: His reasoning wasn't accurate, but the person you spoke with managed to give you a mostly correct answer.
🙂
And before you complain (again); YES you do have to sign in with a passport. The passport can be filled with crap information if you want... it doesn't matter. The site doesn't go out and confirm you have some kind of business license before it lets you in. They do it because the system builder team likes to have at least a rough estimate of how many people are interested in the program, and someone who takes the 2 minutes to fill out some passport information (real or not) to view the information is more likely to be a potential system builder than someone just browsing through (which is why they don't rely on just counting hits to a page). It dictates how much effort they put into improving it and making it better.
