Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 15th Apr 2011 23:13 UTC

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Member since:
2011-01-28
modmans2ndcoming,
"I have swapped out Hard drives, and motherboards, etc and never had a problem. One time I had gutted a machine and needed to call. I explained the issue and she said 'no problem', a few seconds latter she said 'try activating now' and it worked."
The rules are well documented, though not necessarily trivial.
WGA will let some modifications pass, other changes trigger a new activation. Depending on the actual changes, the time between reinstalls/mods, the presence of an OEM version and hardware, etc, MS may or may not permit you to activate automatically. For most people, they'll just activate once. For techs who upgrade either their own systems or client systems frequently it's a real nuisance which gets old very quickly.
Once I had to install MS Office on a number of computers without internet access, that was a horrible waste of time. I wonder if it would have been faster to physically take the computers to my house and activate them online...probably not, but for many people activation sucks. The only reason MS get away with it is because of the monopoly, otherwise there are so many instances of anti-features that MS would have crashed and burned a long time ago.