I recently bought a new Winndows XP licence for using with Parallels. I have some questions regarding activation. How sensible is the uid of the installation when changing disc size, memory, ethernet cards etc. Do I have to stick with the configuration I chose when activating or it is possible to e.g. decrease or increase the available memory to the vm without the need to reactivate? Any recommandations and experiences? Of course I wait with the activation until the availablity of the GA version and make a clean install. Thanks a lot, bigman
This is a good question; I'd like to know what XP is going to consider to be a new machine when running in the virtualized environment.
I've not yet activated my XP, but here's what I understand. I think it looks at a number of hardware variables (probably not publicly published), and allows a few of them to change after activation. (You may have to activate again after a small hardware change, but that should be okay for a few times.) At some point your online activation will fail, and you'll have to phone Microsoft to explain to them what is happening. As long as you're legitimately making changes, and you're not activating several times in a short period of time, I don't think you should have any problems. Having to activate software really sucks, but unfortunately the software manufacturers need some means to protect their work. Maybe someday the culture of piracy will change, or somebody will come up with a more workable solution to the problem, but blind trust has been shown to fail even with many otherwise very honourable individuals.
But its legitimate to change the memory and hard drive space for a vm. And it is legitimate to do this as often as one like. And this should be possible without the need to tell ms people why I need this. But that is not the point here. I would like an official statement from parallels what is possible and what not before I activate XP. In vmware there is a warning regarding this. Parallels lacks this information. And I dont want to spend money to try it out on my own and hear me swearing "...(insert your favourite swear-words here) if I only had given the vm 200MB more ram...".
I had to reactivate my WinXP (Dell OEM version) when I installed it under Parallels. Before that I had changed the harddisk from 40 to 60GB and used Acronis disk imaging to copy the XP back to the new disk. Recently, I had the computer (Dell 8500 Inspiron Laptop) completely die, the power lite would come on for about 5 seconds, and that was it. Dell replaced the system board and everything was fine. Done a backup of the disk, then reformated and made non-dualboot with Suse 10.0. Installed Parallels, then WinXP. It came up with message that I needed to reactivate within 30 days. Called Microsoft and spent about a half an hour on the phone and got a new god awfully long number to put in. I told them that the system board and drive had been replaced a various times, did not tell them it was being installed under parallels, but it was on the original computer. It was a pain though.
