Since my bought a new Macbook Pro a few weeks back, I've installed Parallels to create virtual OS environments. Naturally I created a Windows virtual machine so I can run my old PC games again.

As everyone knows, WinXP requires you to activate it with Microsoft to "prevent" piracy. When I first built my PC many years ago, I had activated this installation of XP on it. I decided to reuse this XP disc for my Macbook VM.

Surprisingly it worked. I was able to activate the same XP disc on a virtual machine with no errors or any other problems. According to MS, I shouldn't be able to do this because it's a brand new machine; the hardware is completely different from my old PC. At a minimum I should have been required to call MS support and have someone activate it that way, which is what I expected to do.

Is anyone aware of MS not checking on "true" activation anymore? Does this mean that people can create as many VMs as they want and distribute them, a la VMWare Player? Has anyone else encountered this?

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

Heh - They probably dont care about Windows XP now seeing as they're having enough troubles with Windows Vista

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http://localtech.gidblog.com - Common issues related to Windows XP, Windows Vista, Microsoft Office and other things...

I'm figuring that they stopped monitoring the activation process once Vista came out. However, since XP is still being sold by so many companies, it seems like MS would care about it. Oh well, it's not like I'm a pirate (this time ).

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.