A nice surprise on my xp oem

I recently rebuild. The only things I reused were the HDD and PSU. Everything else is new. Went from a AM2 Gigabyte S-Series micro-atx and a AMD 3800+ Single core processor to a Gigabyte S-Series x38-DS4 and a e8400.

Now I had a oem legit copy of xp. I had used it in my old system for a year. Zero re-activations. I build this new machine and put xp on it just to test it out to see if I would want to go to vista or not, and buy after the 30 days was up.

Well, I went ahead and clicked activation just to see, and it worked? Now call me stupid, but I thought OEM's couldnt be transfered between motherboards? Is it because, while different models, the motherboards were the Same brand and such?

The old pc is not being used at all, and its been 2+ weeks since It went online.

Did I just get lucky?


I hope this post isnt thought to be something about piracy. I didnt do or change anything, and just went with the normal steps anyone would to activate. I wasnt expecting it to be accepted because i knew about OEM, and wondered if anyone could tell me why it happened. I dont want to get in "trouble" or have MS later on deem my copy invalid and cut me off out of the blue.

OEM copies are not supposed to be transfered, however XP isnt as smart as Vista when it comes to activation and hardware changes. You can re-activate an OEM copy as many times as you want I have found. Sometimes you have to call them to do it though.

Sometimes they will ask you if you changed any hardware such as the board. This is where I cannot tell you want to say as one way is wrong the other is right

Thats fine. I already planned on buying a XP pro retail in march before they stop selling them later this year so this was just something interesting for me.

Yeah. I think I've reinstalled my OEM xp about a million times and never had any problems.

There is a cut-off time for sequential activations where the hardware profile is reset. I believe it's 120 days. After that time a new install can be activated over the Internet even if he hardware has changed.

The OEM licensing only became more strict with Vista. If you read the EULA for XP it states that for both retail and OEM you are able to transfer the OS to a new computer as long as you ninstall it from the old one.