Some possible clarification about the Vista license-activation deal:
A Microsoft spokesman from the Licensing Dept told bit-tech that ... Windows Vista will not require a system re-activation unless the hard drive and one other component is changed. This means that enthusiasts will be able to swap CPUs, memory and graphics cards out without any worry about having to re-activate with MS, either on the internet or by phone.
Should you change the hard drive and another piece of hardware - for example for a major upgrade such as a motherboard change that requires a re-installation - Microsoft will allow you to re-activate up to 10 times. You will not, however, be able to have more than one machine activated concurrently.
I've got no firsthand confirmation directly from MS about any of this, but this actually sounds better than what currently exists with XP. Anyone who goes over the 10-activation limit (and I don't even see enthusiasts having this problem) can also phone in an activation, which tends to be pretty painless. (You can bet someone is going to try, just to see what happens.)
(Bear in mind, I'm not positive if what they are talking about is the final, end-user license for Vista or just the licensing that's in place now for RC testers, but the wording sounds a lot like it's for the real deal.)
Also, I am not sure if making a disk image from one drive to another counts as a new hard drive, though. My experiences has shown that it doesn't. When I imaged my XP system drive to a new hard drive, I checked the product activation counters with XPInfo and found that the HD counter had not changed. I suspect the HD counter is derived from the partition serial number and not the drive hardware itself, but I don't know if that's the same in Vista. (On a whim, I ran XPInfo on Vista RC1 after activating it, and got an error message -- apparently the APIs used to obtain a computer's PA data have changed since XP.)
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