Vista OEM/Retail - Esato archive

Posted by msmmsm
Having just ordered Vista premium 64bit OEM, I was wondering what the difference is between OEM and the full retail product, apart from the price?

Most companies send these out without having to buy any sort of hardware.

Why pay considerably more for the same product?

Posted by Toney_Ericsson
An OEM Licence is not transferable like a full one is, once you install an OEM OS on a computer it will last as long as that computer runs. If you performed a major upgrade such as a new Mobbo then there is a high chance that the windows OS would dectect and class your computer as a different one and ask you to activate windows once again, to do this you would probably have to ring Microsoft to talk nicely to them and explain and reactivate windows once again.

If you bought a new computer after you had used your OEM disk on a computer you would also have to buy a new copy of windows, you would not be able to intstall the OEM as the COA from the disk would have been registered with the old machine.

However, If you bought a full version of windows then once your computer dies you can transfer the licence and install it on another machine without any problems regardless of what upgrades you did, as long as the licence only exist on that computer.

Posted by msmmsm
Thanks for that, going to install on a laptop, so OEM seems the best for me.