Windows Vista: Will This Work?

[LiquidFlame]

So I just got my free upgrade to Windows Vista in the mail today. I was able to get it because it came with my laptop and it was Windows Vista Ready and everything. My laptop is a Compaq, and the Vista upgrade as HP written all over the CD. I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this question, but if I tried to install the Vista upgrade on my home built desktop would it even work. I'm sure that the upgrade CD will only work for HP computers, but does anyone have any idea how to get it to work with my desktop? Thanks for the advice in advanced.

 

[Matthias99]

IIRC the "upgrade" versions most OEMs were sending out -- at least as of a month or two ago -- could be installed on any system.

However, you basically have to 'trade in' the license for whatever OS was on your laptop originally. You can't (legally) install that copy of Vista on your desktop and keep the OEM OS you originally got on the laptop. And Microsoft's stance is probably that you can't move the OEM XP from the laptop to another system when you upgrade it -- your upgrade is only really usable on the laptop.

In practice, they pretty much just want you to have the required number of licenses. So if you have a retail XP on your desktop now, you could essentially move that onto the laptop and have the Vista install on your desktop -- this is technically violating the OEM upgrade restrictions (at least I think it is), but Microsoft wouldn't really care unless you did this on a whole lot of systems or were a reseller.

 

[LiquidFlame]

So if I understand you right, I could take my Windows XP Pro and install it on my laptop, and then install my upgrade Vista on my desktop and it could possibly work? Also if I installed it on my desktop, would I never be able to install it on my laptop if I felt like it later. Because with my experience with XP, as long as you had a valid CD-key you could install it on any computer.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: LiquidFlame
So if I understand you right, I could take my Windows XP Pro and install it on my laptop, and then install my upgrade Vista on my desktop and it could possibly work? Also if I installed it on my desktop, would I never be able to install it on my laptop if I felt like it later. Because with my experience with XP, as long as you had a valid CD-key you could install it on any computer.

If you have a valid CD-key you can install Vista or XP on any computer (though you may have to call in to reactivate it, and if you're 100% honest about what you are doing they could in theory refuse to reactivate it on another system). Unless you have some funny OEM version that is locked to the BIOS on a particular kind of system. The licensing agreements for Windows say that you can't transfer OEM licenses from one system to another. Whether such agreements would really hold up in court is another question...

However, I'm sure Microsoft's official position would be that you can't put the Vista upgrade that is for your laptop onto another system, since it's an OEM copy and you've technically already installed it on the laptop. In practice they're frequently lenient on individual home users about this sort of thing.

IMO, if you have another retail copy of XP you could move onto the laptop you're not really doing anything that hurts MS; these provisions are there to make sure companies don't try to resell OEM licenses separately from systems, or reuse hundreds/thousands of old OEM licenses instead of buying new ones when they replace their systems. But it's technically against the licensing agreement.