Legal terms for selling with preinstalled windows.

If a retailer was to buy alot of, lets say, Dell towers as barebone with the XP sticker in tact from a wholeseller, would it be legal to put in your own harddrives and install windows with the sticker and retail them?

Probably not since the XP code on Dell are likely tied to Dell custom version of OEM XP and a retail version will defiantly not work with the OEM keys. if you try to circumvent it by installing XP on each PC using same key over, the key will get flagged as being used too much and be locked out.

If you can get a bunch of OEM XP discs (no manual, case, anything just disc and key) and you include one disc and one unique key with each Dell, it will be fine. be sure to remove the old Dell key as it's not the same.

not that this answers your question really. But on my dell optiplex i got for free (my server). I had a dell key code on the case no cd tho and regular ones as said dont work. But i popped in my buddies HP disk with the extra cd and it installed just fine. I was worried it would install all of the hp crap with it but it was fine all the right drivers and everything.

Also my buddies alienware has a cd key on it and we used ehhhh trying to think not a regular verison we used another prebuilt machines cd (cause he lost his) i believe it was a dell's and it worked just fine on his alienware (he had bought this before dell bought alienware).

So you can get the cd keys to work with other xp cds they just have to be for prebuilt machines like hp's etc.

Anyway as for the legal part of it no clue but seeing as that key is tied to the machine and you own the machine i don't see why not?

we got a whole bunch of these dell optiplex's at work bought a whole palette of them 20 boxes plus a few old p3 dell box's and we had to sit and reinstall all of them to use in the shop.

yea because im buying a bunch of P4+ dells in palettes of 50 that have keys on them with no harddrives.. i would like to sell them with windows installed, cant find where to look to see if doing that is legal or not =/

I don't forsee any problems with that as they have the COA on the machine and you are only adding a missing drive. The OEM COA is tied to the machine itself and selling one with the original OS is not illeagal to my knowledge.

shadowdr said:

I don't forsee any problems with that as they have the COA on the machine and you are only adding a missing drive. The OEM COA is tied to the machine itself and selling one with the original OS is not illeagal to my knowledge.

Click to expand...

thanks

You know who to contact about this...good ol' MS.

If you ask MS they'll say that the license was for the original owner only, and you have to buy new licenses. Or they'll say it was for the mobo, or the hard drive, or wtfever, I've gotten 6 or 7 different answers from different service agents at MS customer service. I don't think THEY even know what it's supposed to be on anymore

Oh they know what it's supposed to be tied to, don't worry...whatever piece of hardware didn't come with it!!!

sry, just screwin around. It really does look like M$ doesn't have a clear directive for this.

Nick

Servive agent: Hello, you actually got that POS (piece of errr software) to work? You must be doing something wrong, if not wholly illegal.

Me: No, it was working before, but I got a virus, or my hard drive crashed, and I had to reinstall..

Service Agent: The original License tied the software to that virus, You'll have to buy a new one.

MARCI said:

Servive agent: Hello, you actually got that POS (piece of errr software) to work? You must be doing something wrong, if not wholly illegal.

Me: No, it was working before, but I got a virus, or my hard drive crashed, and I had to reinstall..

Service Agent: The original License tied the software to that virus, You'll have to buy a new one.

Click to expand...

LOL...

Im not sure what you are asking.
That the winxp sticker on the dell is valid for ONLY that ONE dell machine. You may use a windows OEM cd. ( which would be more difficult) but you will have to active. or if you have a XP Dell cd you can use that to install windows XP. it will not ask for activation providing the dell machine still has the original Dell motherboard inside of it.

I think it is legal if the code works... if the versions are too different, the code won't work though.

I'm not 100% sure though.