About Product Activation

[Tails]

I was doing some research about the new Norton Antivirus 2004 and everything that comes up in Google is about how it's activation is flawed and if you reinstall your OS or add new hardware, you must reactivate. There's too many sources to list, you can find it by Googling "Norton Antivirus 2004 activation". The problem most sites are saying is you can only reactivate 5 times.

They say Windows XP is also like this with activation keys, so I searched for "Windows XP activation". I've had my XP machine since 6/12/03 and I already reinstalled 4 to 5 times at the least. Does this mean that after X amount of reinstalls, it will refuse to boot up my pc? XP really isn't as stable as many people say. Maybe it's rare, but when it does happen reinstalling is imminent. It's said that the serial is generated by a combination of hardware identification and the variable product ID This PC came with a sticker on the side (the Microsoft kind that you can easily see it is layered to say VOID if you peel it, like many video stores use) with the key to activate. I never have had any hardware upgrades since it would void my warranty. Who knows where warranty stands. . Is this a nightmare waiting to happen for XP users? Where would warranty stand on this if XP limits reactivations in the same way as Symantec does with Norton AV 2004? Is this a nightmare waiting to happen? There's been no problems for me and there may be no relation between NAV and M$'s activations. But I prefer to think ahead and be safe.

[Spookster]

The recovery CD that came with my Gateway doesn't require WinXP to be activated so I've never had that problem. As for Norton AV I run into problems when I reinstall it as far as the subscription expiring early because of it.

[oracleguy]

Your making something out of nothing, the way the activation thing works is that you can only activate it once (or maybe twice) in believe a 90 day period online (if you need to do it again, you can call to get a activation code). The whole concept to the activation thing is that if they see the same product being activated in different parts of the world in a short period of time, they know that it could be pirated.

If you buy a copy of XP, install it and then in 6 months have to re-install and even upgraded a couple components, it will still activate. I went to the Microsoft launch of XP back in 2001 and as you can imagine the activation thing was a big topic and the M$ guy said that they understand that some people upgrade their computers constantly and will require activating it quite a few times in the life of the OS.

And the sticker on the side of your computer is the product key, not an activation key.

Like Spook said his computer doesn't require activation because it was a manufactured machine and I bet if you tried to install that copy of Windows on another computer it wouldn't run because it could tell from the BIOS that it wasn't a Gateway.