Is this legal?

[crazychicken]

I bought an HP, but even though it came w/ XP Home installed, i did not get an installation disk, or even an HP restore disk. they are doing a new thing now where they put it all on a second partition. I was wondering.. if i use my friends XP home cd and my key (the one on the side of my new machine) is this legal?

lmk

thanks
david

 

[MainFramed]

yea its legal, your serial key...you have prof you bought the machine. so eh its legal enough

btw i bought a laptop they didint give me a system disk either :|

 

[Codewiz]

Yeah that $0.20 it costs to include a recovery cd just breaks a company. I find it retarded a company will not provide media. I guess they never expect hard drives to fail......

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Codewiz
Yeah that $0.20 it costs to include a recovery cd just breaks a company. I find it retarded a company will not provide media. I guess they never expect hard drives to fail......

And they waste the extra disk space with the hidden partition (sometimes ALOT of space)! It wouldn't bother me nearly as much if it was an option (if you ordered and had to pay a couple bucks more for the restore cd, I would just order it), but I don't like oem's who only provide the HD solution.

Bill

 

[MrPhelps]

Originally posted by: Codewiz
Yeah that $0.20 it costs to include a recovery cd just breaks a company. I find it retarded a company will not provide media. I guess they never expect hard drives to fail......

Ditto that, At least my Compaq came with a restore.


Prebuilt is just that way, Build your own!

 

[Slogun]

Originally posted by: crazychicken
I bought an HP, but even though it came w/ XP Home installed, i did not get an installation disk, or even an HP restore disk. they are doing a new thing now where they put it all on a second partition. I was wondering.. if i use my friends XP home cd and my key (the one on the side of my new machine) is this legal?

lmk

thanks
david

I'm not a lawyer, but I would suppose it is legal unless you actually copy your friend's XP CD.
I am not preaching to you what you should or shouldn't do, just offering an opinion on your legal question.

I don't think I would buy a prebuilt without insisting on the media being included.

 

[crazychicken]

any one actually know about the legality though? can i copy the XP Home as long as i use my key? how does that work?
bump

 

[Ionizer86]

Yup, I've seen packages online where they sell multiple licences (around 5 or so) with only one media (one CD). Since you have a licence, that's the important thing. The CD is just that: a CD.

 

[oniq]

I don't see why it wouldn't be legal. I am in the same boat as yourself, except I bought a Compaq Presario. It comes with THREE cds that hold the image of the original hard drive, so to restore I have to lose my current setup. So, I plan on copying the CD from a friend, I have my OWN CD key. When I bought the laptop and it said it came with Windows XP Home, I thought I was getting a copy of it, but I guess that wasn't the case.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: oniq
I don't see why it wouldn't be legal. I am in the same boat as yourself, except I bought a Compaq Presario. It comes with THREE cds that hold the image of the original hard drive, so to restore I have to lose my current setup. So, I plan on copying the CD from a friend, I have my OWN CD key. When I bought the laptop and it said it came with Windows XP Home, I thought I was getting a copy of it, but I guess that wasn't the case.

The usual "I'm not a lawyer" applies here, but depending on what you do with the cd copy, it might be a problem. If you use the CD copy to reinstall the Presario you purchased, I think you'd be fine (but then again, you have the restore disks so you could use those worst case). If you wanted to move that XP install to another machine, I *think* you might have a problem. The way the license works (again, not a lawyer, this is what I recall) is that you may have been given XP at a discount for use on that machine, and as such it's might be tied to that machine. I'm not sure the license that come as part of a bundle allow you to move it to another system.

Now a retail license definately does allow you to, the issue is just if your license is different because it was discounted as part of the machine. The original license statement that came with it (might be on the recover disks tho) should clear it up.

Bill

 

[crazychicken]

again, i received no recovery disks

also, will i have a problem using this key with a normal retail disk? i'm talking about software wise, not legality

lmk
david
bump

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: crazychicken
again, i received no recovery disks
also, will i have a problem using this key with a normal retail disk? i'm talking about software wise, not legality
david
bump

Sorry Dave, I was responding to oniq's config, not yours. But some of what I said does apply, are you intending to use your friends disk to be able to reinstall on your HP (so you don't need to worry about the recovery partition, or did you want to transfer this to another machine?

Bill

 

[crazychicken]

all i want to do is delete their dumb partition, but to do that, i'll need to reinstall xp, but since i got a key, i think we've all determined that i am allowed to use my key w/ a friends cd.

thanks

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: crazychicken
all i want to do is delete their dumb partition, but to do that, i'll need to reinstall xp, but since i got a key, i think we've all determined that i am allowed to use my key w/ a friends cd.
thanks

Last caviat, you might want to make SURE that works (I think it should). But for example, my MSDN key's won't activate a retail copy of XP and vice versa. It is possible that the key you have won't activate a retail one, so before you nuke the partition I would test this (if you can). If not, perhaps backup the partition via Ghost to CD (just in case?)

Bill