How to Avoid Reactivating Windows XP After a Reinstall

Video Transcript

"Did you know that changing out your network card will destroy Windows activation faster than anything else? Hi, I'm Dan Afonso of Enfold IT and Afonso Consulting. Windows activation has sort of been the subject of a lot of mystery in the XP world, but it's actually not that complicated. What it turns out is Microsoft, when you first register your machine, comes up with a unique identifier for your machine, and this is based on 10 factors. These are you display adapter, your SCSI adapter, your ID adapter, how much RAM you have, what your... what your network card's hardware address is, processor type, processor serial number, hard drive type, hard drive volume ID, and your CD Rom/DVD, you know, how many you have in that. Now, each one of these gets a vote. And your network card gets three votes. So you can go up to 12 as a maximum score when you try and reactivate. No matter what you do when you reinstall XP, it's going to ask you to reactivate, but there's not going to be any issues if you haven't changed out too much. And since the network card counts for the three votes, as long as you don't change that one, you should be okay if you don't change out too many other things. Now, if you end up changing out a lot of hardware, unfortunately, you're going to end up reactivating, and that requires a call to Microsoft to explain the circumstances. They're pretty generous with it, so it's not going to be too much of an issue, but just watch out. And remember, keep the NIC card in there, don't change out your motherboard if you don't have to, and you should be fine. I'm Dan Afonso from Enfold IT and Afonso Consulting, and this has been how to avoid reactivation of Windows XP."