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Unread 14-10-2001, 10:26
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Re: Re: Microsoft in FIRST kits

Quote:
Originally posted by patrickrd

As far as XP, I hear it's a nice operating system although resource-intensive... but I don't know what FIRST teams would use it for. The way licences work with XP as I understand is that Microsoft maintains a database of which physical computer (it actually stores several different characteristics of your computer -- mac address, CPU speed, hard drive size, etc...) is allowed to use a specific XP licence key. Therefore, unless Microsoft is giving out multi-computer licence keys, then you'd only be able to put it on a single machine.
As someone who's been using XP for the last couple of months, as well as having seen the information that gets passed along to OEMs, I will say that it is slightly more demanding on the hardware than anything in the Win9x line, but being based off the NT code base, that's not real surprising. (For those of you that didn't know, until XP, MS had two different OS lines - the 9x line for home users(95,98,ME), and the NT/2000 line for business users.) But what I will say comes along with this is probably the most stable and functional OS I have seen Microsoft put out yet, and this is coming from someone who's had his hands in every one since Win 3.1. There has not yet been a device I've found that XP has not had drivers for out of the box. Even such oddball devices such as my Compaq/Rockwell 56K HCF winmodem didn't need outside drivers for XP.

As far as licensing goes, the way Patrick described it is partially correct. Yes, certain parts of the system it is installed on are "photographed" to keep it from being installed on multiple machines. However, not all of this information is sent to Microsoft. For each item that is looked at, only a small fraction of the data is actually sent to Microsoft, so there is no way that the information given to them could be used to determine what you have in your computer. To use the example from their own technical document,
Quote:
From MS Tech Bulletin on WinXP Product Activation
Example: A processor serial number is 96 bits in length. When hashed, the resultant one-way hash is 128 bits in length. Microsoft uses only six bits from that resultant hash in activation's hardware hash. Due to the nature of the hashing algorithim, those six bits cannot be backwards calculated to determine anything at all about the original processor serial number.
Also, for what Microsoft calls their "Open," "Enterprise," and "Select" licensing schemes, a different install CD and product key are used which bypass the Activation scheme entirely.

Finally, to keep those power users who are constantly upgrading their systems happy, Microsoft's database resets your record every three months, so you can reactivate 4 times a year without any problems.
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