Curiosity may kill this cat (WinXP)

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I seem to remember in one of Woody’s articles that after about 3 months, a person is able to re-install XP on another machine. Am I accurate here? What would happen if one were to just install it on a second machine without uninstalling the original? Would microsoft pick this up? Is it possible to uninstall xp on an ntfs partition and revert back to win98 if the xp is expired and locked (i.e. illegal copy). I’m not planning any crime here, just curious.

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Once activated, the installation of XP is tied to the hardware signature of the PC it’s installed upon. That hasn’t, and won’t, change. If you were to install the same copy on a second system, you’d suffer one of two consequences:

1. If you didn’t activate it, it would cease to work after the grace period expires.
2. If you tried to activate it, it would fail and you would be provided with a number to contact Microsoft for re-activation. The original installation would not be affected.

Windows 98 cannot read NTFS partitions, so uninstalling XP wouldn’t solve the problem; you would need to format or use Paragon Partition Manager to convert the file system back to FAT32, which Windows 98 can read.

HTH,

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