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Windows tracks a "scorecard" of your hardware. Components like your cpu, video card, hd, etc are worth 1 point. Your NIC is worth 3 points.

While you have the right basic idea, you need to understand more what WPA actually keeps track of to make sense of it.

You can find a good explanation here. To summarize, though, basically you have the right idea in that more than three "hardware" changes trigger reactivation. In reality, several software, and particularly BIOS, changes also count as "hardware" as WPA looks at it (although very very unlikely, you could actually flash your BIOS to a new version, with no real hardware changes, and need to reactivate).

As the two easiest "soft" changes, WPA considers your MAC address (which you mention) and your HDD's volume serial number (NOT unchangeable, though the user probably wouldn't even notice if it changed).



Of course, all this seems somewhat pointless to argue over, as WGA and WPA don't refer to the same thing.

That you're allowed to use the same license over and over, so long as you use the same install set, which it sounds like you did. The trick is the phone home. The activation process can be done three times without an explanation call to MS to verify that you're the owner and that you want to reinstall for reason XYZ. Also, if you change massive amounts of hardware in your system, you have to reverify, but not for simple upgrades (ie, one component at a time in most cases).

check the following links
http://www.licenturion.com/xp/fully-licensed-wpa.t xt
http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.php
and this was interesting
http://www.aviransplace.com/index.php/archives/200 5/02/22/changes-in-windows-xp-product-activation/

XP stopped asking you to re-activate after hardware changes a long time ago.

It allows you three changes from a set of ten things it watches, IIRC, details here so you might not have pushed it that far yet.

It *did* ask me to reactivate when I replaced my motherboard last April - if it's changed since then then I haven't heard about it.

Only if you've changed enough other stuff between activations too; see here. Just swapping hard drives in and out won't do it, we do that all the time here.

for one thing you can check the AppDB at wine first to see if it runs (or transgaming)... then you can go out an buy it. and who wants a game console that you can only set up on one tv and if you change tvs you have to tell the console makers for permission

. sounds like a blast! where can i get my "game console" so i can begin raping my computer ;p

I should also state the glaringly obvious, which is that everyone has access to the machine code.

What does a C/C++ compiler really do? It basically just solves bunch of complex allocation and alignment problems required to implement a specification. When you're looking at the machine code, you're seeing the solution to those problems. To reiterate: when you're looking at the machine code, the problem is already solved; you're seeing the raw specification, open for all who have the binaries to see.

Tools like SoftIce, RegMon, and FileMon, or any good debugger for that matter, can all be used to gain a very clear understanding of exactly what the code does.

Example: Windows Product Activation accurately reverse engineered by some German guys who didn't have the source code.

The biggest benefit you get from having the original source code is that it makes it easier to change the specification, since all you have to do is recompile.

And this brings me back to my original point, which is that the difference between open and closed is fundamentally not a difference in the availability of information.

D