XP Licensing

[BouncingSoul]

Anyone know how many licenses you get with a volume xp license?

We have a genuine xp disk. I know I've installed it on over 50 machines, I have no idea how many times its been installed by others. I also have no idea how many times its been installed ... uh ... outside the company. Does MS ever check this? I don't know how much it costs, maybe its so much that they don't care. It just got me thinking is all.

Also is there a difference in the install of a volume license and a regular install? Cause we have a TON of key's in our safe, so if need be I'll just change some of the volume keys to our other individual keys if there is no difference.

 

[fitz]

You get as many licenses as you purchased with your volume license.

Assuming you are running at least a Select agreement, you have as many licenses as you have purchased under your select agreement (you can always purchase more assuming your select agreement is still valid). If you are running under an enterprise agreement, your desktop license is however many you report to microsoft each year when you true-up with them.

Understand also, the windows volume license key is not a full license.. technically, it's an "upgrade" of the OEM license and requires a base OS to legally install. ie: let's say you bought 100 systems from Dell this year with the included OEM license for Windows XP.. if you have software assurance and at least 100 windows desktop licenses from Microsoft, you could upgrade all those machines to Vista when released.

On the flip side, if you built 100 machines from scratch and never purchased a base OS license (ie: installed Linux or whatnot) you would not be able to legally install Vista on those desktops even if you had 100 Windows Desktop licenses.

Microsoft licensing sucks balls! Went through a crap load of different scenarios a couple months back when we were redoing our select agreement with them. If you need further clarification on things, let me know..

edit:

Also is there a difference in the install of a volume license and a regular install? Cause we have a TON of key's in our safe, so if need be I'll just change some of the volume keys to our other individual keys if there is no difference.

In XP, the volume license key does not require activation while a regular install using an OEM key requires activation. To the best of my knowledge, you cannot take your media made for volume keys and use the OEM product key and you cannot take a retail copy and use a volume license key to install. I might be wrong about that.. it's been a long time since I tried to install anything with a retail/OEM CD..

 

[BouncingSoul]

Thanks man, REPS!

I was just uncertain. The last thing I want is one of our major systems to go down cause we had too many of one license or something. I wasn't here when we got the latest disk so I don't know how many we paid for, just that we almost always get white boxes and install the volume copy on all our machines. And thats a lot of systems. I kinda figured a volume install had something different but I couldn't tell. It looks like any other xp install just no activation.