Dell Restore CDs

[morganlefay]

but my understanding of the MS licensing is you can "downgrade" your OS to any previous version..
So if you downgraded your XP Home OEM license to W98 ....it wouldnt be considered piracy

MLF

[nihil]

Negative,

Looks like a pretty clear cut case to me You paid for two installations of XP, and that is what you have got. Hell you had to pay extra for the upgrade disk!

As for the Win98..............you own the CD so you own the software...........anyways, M$ don't sell it anymore, so they haven't lost any revenue have they? Technically the other machine has the pirate version on it?

I have fixed a couple of machines with a WinME upgrade disk in the past.............let me recover the users' data then I reformatted and reinstalled Win98 (they were old machines )

I guess I believe in the "spirit" of the law rather than the letter.

Cheers

[Lansing_Banda]

I love restore cds because they are just OEM copies of the OS. Comes in handy especially with XP. I had my Dell restore cd at college and my serial at home. I was all pissed off but I tried the format->install anyways. Suprisingly, I didn't need a serial; Thanks Dell!

[RoadClosed]

Why wouldn't they make it easy to circumvent? You paid for it like others have said. The alternative is strict copy protection on software, limiting it to one machine and one machine only forever and always. Not my idea of copyright. The license may be limited to a specific OEM so if that is the case, you are violating the law. Wether that is OK with you are not, doesn't matter to me. But it's like expecting the supermarket to tag cans of peas so you can't walk out with it in your pocket, and then saying "that was easy" they should do more to keep me from walking out with those peas. A little late but I felt light hearted.