MS Responds To Vista License Concerns

In case you missed this one, TechWeb sat down with Microsoft and found out just how Vista will impact the enthusiast. After 5 years, I have never had a problem swapping out components with Windows XP, hopefully that stays the same with Vista.

The hardware tolerance of product activation for Windows Vista has been improved and is more flexible than that for Windows XP. We believe these improvements will better accommodate the needs of our PC enthusiast customers. When hardware components are changed, Microsoft's product activation process compares information derived from the initial validation, which includes the hardware configuration of the device, against the changes that have been made. This process uses an algorithm to help assess whether the software is installed on the same device. Validation will fail if the software detects a substantially different hardware configuration.