Vistas Way Or The Law Suit Way
I read an article today (Here), talking about Microsoft’s new licence agreement for Windows Vista that Microsoft has amended their licence agreement in my opinion for the worst.
Currently (with Windows XP) you can install you copy on any device you like as long as it is the only installed copy. This means that if you get a new PC and want to install your copy of XP on it you can provided you un-install it from the previous machine. All well and good, especially for people who upgrade or renew their hardware on a regular basis.
Windows Vista will let you do this but only once. Now I think that’s a bad thing. When you install your copy of Vista for the first time you assign it to a device (physical system) and that is then the licenced machine. You can then once and once only transfer it to a new machine or third party, if you sell the machine to your mate for example. Just what measures they are going to or a willing to take to enforce this I don’t know but I would imagine it would take a compulsory registration and some information about the machine to do it.
I wonder if you can install it multiple times on one machine. And if you can’t then I’m not even going to bother getting one copy, I think I’ll switch to Linux, that or a super sexy Macbook Pro. I’ve just started to download Vistas RC1 beta to istall on my second machine. I’ll let you all know how it goes.