Full, Upgrade, Retail or OEM

Just to chime in on the title of this post.

Full and Upgrade are types of installs

OEM and Retail are types of licenses..

Just to chime in on the title of this post.

Full and Upgrade are types of installs

OEM and Retail are types of licenses..

That's exactly what I was trying to get at as I thought that was the case. Do you have any view on the licensing for retail versions? I had understood that they could be moved from one machine to another (as long as on o only one machine at a time) and were not restricted to the machine by hardware hash like OEM copies. I thought that was why OEM copies were cheaper.

kevvyb said:

That's exactly what I was trying to get at as I thought that was the case. Do you have any view on the licensing for retail versions? I had understood that they could be moved from one machine to another (as long as on o only one machine at a time) and were not restricted to the machine by hardware hash like OEM copies. I thought that was why OEM copies were cheaper.

Yea OEM is restricted to the origional system it was put on.

Retail can be used on unlimited systems, but only 1 at a time.

Sorry kev, I completely misunderstood the question you were asking. my last post is somewhat related, although not explained well. Retail licenses, as far as I know, able to be transferred from machine to machine, as long as you only have one activated machine running. Like, if you install on one machine, ok, then once you install on another machine, you're not allowed to run the first machines installation anymore. I thnk thats how it works, someone correct me if I'm wrong

I probably didn't ask the question very clearly.

I have never seen this working except with Adobe Photoshop. That app somehow registers the installation on up to two machines. Beyond that you get an error message advising that it is already installed on two machines (as allowed by license). The process of uninstalling can be done with an operation to move the license to another machine. Very clever. If you forget to do the 'official transfer' operation you're stuffed. Lost one bit of the license!!

Never used anything other than OEM versions of windows so far so have not idea how MS does it.

So can I assume that the versions of Win 7 on offer will be retail versions?

kevvyb said:

I probably didn't ask the question very clearly.

I have never seen this working except with Adobe Photoshop. That app somehow registers the installation on up to two machines. Beyond that you get an error message advising that it is already installed on two machines (as allowed by license). The process of uninstalling can be done with an operation to move the license to another machine. Very clever. If you forget to do the 'official transfer' operation you're stuffed. Lost one bit of the license!!

Never used anything other than OEM versions of windows so far so have not idea how MS does it.

So can I assume that the versions of Win 7 on offer will be retail versions?

yeah, when you buy windows 7 either from a store or from the MS website, it will be a retail license.

Thanks for the info - that's great to know. I don't have my initial disk for VIsta. Thanks!

grouchpunk08 said:

yeah, when you buy windows 7 either from a store or from the MS website, it will be a retail license.

However, if you do purchase Windows 7 or Vista online...you have to watch to see if you are buying an OEM copy or a retail copy. I just picked up Windows Vista 64 Ultimate from NewEgg.com with a free upgrade voucher to Windows 7 64 bit ultimate. The cost was $189 for the license for OEM and $249 for the retail license.

As discussed in this thread, had I gone with the retail, I could have moved it to another computer if I had wanted to. With the OEM copy, it's really tied to my specific computer that I activated it on. However, if you change enough hardware out on the machine, you have to reactivate and that sometimes fails if the machine "appears" too different to Microsoft. Generally speaking, a phone call to MS gets you activated again. I've heard of cases where people have moved the OEM to a completely different computer and called MS and did get activated again. I however am content with having this OS on this 1 and only 1 computer and following the license agreement. For all of my other computers, i run various flavors of Linux.