Can I do this without buying XP again?

[stratcat]

Our "family pc" is a newer 1.8ghz WinXP pc. I was thinking about swapping it for my older Celeron Win98me music pc so I have the faster pc. All the XP pc is really used for is internet and email..

I would essentially just swap hardrives. The family pc would end up with my Celeron mobo and ram, but retain its video card, sound card, harddrive, cd-r, etc.

I am told that if were to swap harddrives WinXP could recognize the changes and crash and I would have to buy WinXP again. Is that true?

[wogg]

This tutorial shows how to prepare XP for a change of motherboards: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=77909774&m=1400925745

You may need to re-activate XP though, but that shouldn't be a problem.

[stratcat]

What do you mean by "reactivate" XP?

[wogg]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation/overviews/activation.asp

XP requires re-activation when there is a significant change in the hardware, such as booting up with a completely different motherboard, processor NIC, etc. You'd still be using it on a single PC so activations should be as simple as clicking a button, provided you've got an active internet connection.

If you happened to have a corporate multi license version of XP on your machine you will not need to activate at all.

[Polaris]

I hate their friggin' reactivation bulls*it.

I legally have Windows on all my computers, yet when I wipe a system and reinstall, I have to reactivate.

I know it's no big deal, just a little irritating since I paid $140, I shouldn't have to activate a damn thing.

Ok I'm done. http://www.audioforums.com/forums/biggrin.gif