On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 6:41 PM, Nanley Chery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Every single piece of hardware could be changed on a PC with SLP and > no reactivation would be required – even the motherboard could be > replaced as long as the replacement motherboard was original equipment > manufactured by the OEM and retained the proper BIOS. That's not entirely right. I've had a situation were exchanging the mobo on a system (but preserving all other hardware( required an XP re-activation. I could be mistaken, but I don't think is very open about what they check for when testing WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage). Boot drive "serial numbers" (as in the "format" serial number) could also be part of the equation, I guess. Similarly, I have a notebook (eMachines M6810, an OEM version manufactured of the Arima K7), where tech support told me to upgrade the bios to the latest one for the same machines sold under the Gateway brand. As a result, the BIOS boot logo changed from eMachines to Gateway but the firmware was essentially the same, only one minor point number higher (I don't remeber exactly but let's say it went from eMachines bios v4.3.9 to Gateway Bios v4.4.1). And it triggered an XP re-validation. However I phoned Microsoft, told them the story and had no problem, they issued me a new validation number. HOWEVER, I do think that Virtualbox needs to tackle the issue of Windows activation so It's possible to move VMs from one architecture to the other (AMD/Intel) and not having to deal with windows re-activation issues. In other words, the original install bios values need to pre preserved or faked. I'm not thinking about the technical ramifications of this at the moment, just thinking aloud as an end user. I think there's no way to obtain a perfect "system fingerprint" match on a VM if for instance if what Windows does is do a dump of the Bios ROM and obtain an md5sum of it. (Oh great, I've just given an idea to the Microsoft spies surely lurking on this list). Just my $0.02 FC
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