upgrading motherboad

Hello guys I just have a few questions regarding the license.

I was trying to find out what oem prices would look like and stumbled upon an article saying something about having to buy a new copy of win7 if You upgrade your cpu, motherboard, and, ram. I NEED to upgrade my system soon but that will take some time as I'm not well-off, and i want windows 7 when it comes out( cant go back to xp).
so can anyone tell me if that's true and if its the same for retail win7 as well?

I also want to know if I can use the $119 upgrade media to do a full install? since I'm want to go from xp 32bit to win 64bit.


thanks in advance

To upgrade from WinXP to Win7, you will need to do a clean install with the upgrade media. That's regardless whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit.

dw96 said:

Also I don't think 32 bit XP to 64 bit Seven is possible. I'm not sure though.

I'm not sure about that part either, but to me it doesn't make sense for it not to work. Because lots of people are going to wanna upgrade from XP or Vista 32-bit to 7 x64.

BTW, how did you try an upgrade? I didn't know the upgrade media was already available?

sweet thanks for the help guys :)

J500 said:

Hello guys I just have a few questions regarding the license.

I was trying to find out what oem prices would look like and stumbled upon an article saying something about having to buy a new copy of win7 if You upgrade your cpu, motherboard, and, ram. I NEED to upgrade my system soon but that will take some time as I'm not well-off, and i want windows 7 when it comes out( cant go back to xp).
so can anyone tell me if that's true and if its the same for retail win7 as well?

I also want to know if I can use the $119 upgrade media to do a full install? since I'm want to go from xp 32bit to win 64bit.


thanks in advance

An OEM license is supposed to be tied to the "system" it was originally installed on. In practical terms, "system" = motherboard.

I believe that installing a new CPU or RAM usually wouldn't be enough to trigger the need to re-activate Windows. However, relatively small hardware changes can add up. I've had activation triggered simply by changing HD drivers.

I have read, though, that people have persuaded Microsoft to activate OEM licenses for PCs that have been "repaired" by replacing the motherboard with a different type. That sounds like something that borders on lying.

A Win7 upgrade license can do a clean install. The main restriction is that it requires a "genuine" version of XP or Vista to be on the system. (Some have claimed that "genuine" = activated.) I'm not certain, but I think that Win7 upgrade must be installed to the partition that the qualifying OS is on.

I'm not sure how many times a retail Win7 upgrade can be moved to a new system. If it's like Vista, Microsoft may not be sticky about phone activation, as long as you stay with the one license/one PC principle.