Question for the windows licensing gurus.

[Raduque]

When I built my PC a while back (a couple months after the E6300 came out) I loaded a copy of Vista Home Premium OEM on it. I used it till I upgraded to 4gb ram and Vista refused to use it (BIOS said 4gb, Vista said 2) and this coincidentally happened during the W7 RC release so I switched to W7 x64. Now that I'm a couple months away from this install expiring, I'm wanting to switch back to Vista.

The question I have is, I previously had x86 Vista on here, can my OEM key be used to install x64? And, if so can I use a Vista Retail x64 disk to install and activate with? Keep in mind the hardware of this PC hasn't changed since the Vista OEM key was last used on it(the extra 2gb ram that was added last year did not trigger a WPA event).

 

[F1shF4t]

All keys are both 64 and 32 bit.

From my experiance, OEM keys can be used to do fresh installs, just online activation is not possible. So you probably will have to use phone activation. So far 3 keys off asus laptops and 1 of HP worked fine for me (I always do a fresh install when I first get a laptop and to switch to 64bit)

I have only had one key refuse to work and that one was off the HP DV7 laptop. During phone activation it just told me that I couldn't activate. I didn't really investigate since I got Win7 at the same time.

EDIT: by oem I mean the keys you get with computers from Dell, asus etc. If you bought the vista OEM separately it'll work fine. You may need to call up if some hardware changed but as you mentioned thats not the case.

 

[Raduque]

Yes, it's not a "big box" OEM - I bought it off Newegg.

Don't Vista's activation hashes "reset" after a certain period of time? 6 or 8 months?