license question OEM-versions

Burgurne · 28 Oct 2009

Hi all.
A friend want to buy a Windows 7 Home Premium OEM for his PC. So far so good. But the PC is both a gamer-rig and a "family"-PC, and from XP he is used to have 2 Windows installations on the same PC, but on different harddrives, so when the "family"-installation is booting it can't show or destroy his gamer harddrive (used to be marked as "hidden drive"), and when he boot up to game, he has a very tiny system setup running absolutely the least in background, leaving as much as possible power to his games.

Now, I think he will run into troubble with an OEM version of Windows 7, as with 2 different installs on 2 different harddrives, he must activate Windows 7 OEM 2 times, but from different controllers ("family"-install is 1 harddrive, and his "gamer"-install is RAID 0.
Besides these possible troubbles, is it legal to have to installations on one OEM CD-key? It IS the same PC, and they can of course not run on the same time, but it will require 2 activations with some different hardware, most of the hardware are the same though.

harpua · 28 Oct 2009

I don't see a problem. Why can't he just dual boot into the different OS's. There is no OEM limitation on this , or of having different OS's on different drives in the same system, that I'm aware of. The only OEM limitation is that he can't move the W7 install to another machine.

Sven · 29 Oct 2009

Well, I do the same, but with a retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate. My reason is this:
Have got some nasty keyloggers in the past, so now I Ghost my PC every friday, by turning on my eSATA-HD, and let it boot from eSATA-drive, make a ghost image of my daily Windows 7, onto the eSATA. Shutting eSATA down, taking the power from eSATA, and boot my PC normally. This way, if I got a virus, malware, keylogger or anything else, I can be sure, that it is NOT on my eSATA, as it is only turned on while ghosting, and the netcard is deactivated, so nothing comes into the backup. Therefore I can always restore back to a 100% virusfree installation.

But yes, this requires 2 installations and 2 activations that will look different, as it is done on 2 different harddrives, so Iøm not sure about an OEM, but my retail-version did it without a problem. I think it is legal to do this.

harpua · 29 Oct 2009

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