You’re wrong about the legality of moving a copy from one machine to another, and you’re wrong about the legality of redistribution of the media itself, as long as you’re not modifying the disk, bypassing the protection, or distributing the keys. You’ll have to install them manually from the internet.īut yeah. Even better, even “Branded” XP disks like Dell’s are just normal disks with a different loader – so, even if you don’t have the Dell disk that came with your Dell computer, you can still use a normal Microsoft disk, and the only difference will be that you won’t have some of your drivers. Since all Microsoft-created Windows XP disks of a given flavour (Home/Pro, OEM/Retail/Volume) are identical, it doesn’t matter where you get the CD as long as you have your own personal legitimate key.

Second: there is nothing illegal about distributing the windows disk itself.

Those are legal to move from one machine to another, but also cost more than twice as much. If it’s a retail license, you’ll have a separate folder with the license key *there*. If you have a license sticker? That’s an OEM license, and you CANNOT transfer it to another machine. OEM licenses allow installation only on the computer they were purchased for – and you can tell you have an OEM license by the sticker. This is actually *wrong*, if the copy of XP came with the machine. Hi, Leo, you’re *slightly* wrong on a couple of details.įirst: on the 23rd, you told someone that there’s nothing wrong with transferring a purchased XP Home license from one machine to another. Key you won’t be able to install Windows XP. The product activation code or “product key”. Now there is at least one additional complication if you were to illegallyĭownload an image of a Windows XP installation CD. That’s what software piracy is all about. If you walked into the retail store and walked out with a boxed product hidden You would be stealing software almost exactly as Yes, I’m certain that there are various places where you can illegallyĭownload a copy of Windows XP and probably many other software packages. You must purchase a copy, which typically means getting Microsoft has not made Windows XP available for download, and in any case itĬertainly isn’t free. You can download Windows XP from somewhere, I’m fairly certain you justĪnd even if you did illegally download an image, you wouldn’t have the thing

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