Licensing grumble

After running Win 7 Home Premuim for about 2 weeks now, very happy with it. I was most annoyed at MS however - a few days ago I was in my Bios, having found renewed interest in my PC (now that it does not crash every couple hours) and I decided to switch off the WLAN features on the motherboard as I never have and probably never will network this PC. I figured that the less unneccessary stuff hogging resources the better.

Well, Win 7 announced a short while later that it had detected "hardware or driver changes" and that I had to re-activate it. I tried to do this online but it insisted I would have to do this via the phone. So I played tone dialling with the MS voice sythesiser and reactivated my OS.

This to me is ridiculous and now I probably have wasted a license re-install for when I perhaps want to reformat in the future. It was a simple bios setting Microsoft!!!

You didn't wast anything, aside from a few minutes on the phone.

That's strange, I replaced a video card and sound card with no need for re-activation.

Vista and Windows 7 can be tricky with activation. I already pulled memory from a working, activated Vista system, and tripped the activation. I shut down, put the memory back in place....and the system booted fine, and was back to showing activated. I few days later, I pulled the memory again, without issue.

GregH said:

After running Win 7 Home Premuim for about 2 weeks now, very happy with it. I was most annoyed at MS however - a few days ago I was in my Bios, having found renewed interest in my PC (now that it does not crash every couple hours) and I decided to switch off the WLAN features on the motherboard as I never have and probably never will network this PC. I figured that the less unneccessary stuff hogging resources the better.

Well, Win 7 announced a short while later that it had detected "hardware or driver changes" and that I had to re-activate it. I tried to do this online but it insisted I would have to do this via the phone. So I played tone dialling with the MS voice sythesiser and reactivated my OS.

This to me is ridiculous and now I probably have wasted a license re-install for when I perhaps want to reformat in the future. It was a simple bios setting Microsoft!!!

I believe that one of the major components in the hardware hash for windows activation is the NIC's MAC address. By disabling the NIC in the BIOS setttings, you in effect removed it.

There is no limit to the number of re-activations. You probably don't want to have to do it often, though, or MS may believe that you're violating the license agreement (by activating on more than one PC).

It's still annoying, though.