you mean vista isn't like winblows XP where you have a certain activation limit? so i can do a fresh install & activate my copy of vista like a thousand one times and it won't give me that "you've reached your activation limit" BS?
No BS at all. As long as its on the same machine with no hardware changes you can reformat as many times as you like. But you can re-activate 10 times if new hardware is put in.
And by hardware I mean CPU/Motherboard/Hard drive. Videocard and PSU don't count, and im pretty sure ram upgrades dont either. I just know for a fact that Videocard/PSU don't count as I've replaced mine within 2 months, reformatted half a dozen times with 0 activation issues.
i gotta question,to make a long story short i did a complete fresh install of my OS (vista),my anti spyware,anti virus and firewall prgrams,i also activated them all including the OS and updates them all including the OS.i noticed that vista has the back up option of a "complete PC back up" which of course i did the back up,my question is if i nuke my HDD and do a fresh install then after that i do the "complete PC restore" will i have to
1) re-activate the OS and my protection programs (anti-virus,anti-spyware and firewall)
and
2) since everything is on the back up disks do i have to first install my protection programs first or will they all come back from the restore cd's?. the reason why i am asking is i don't want to find out later if something goes wrong with my system or i catch a nasty piece of spyware and/or virus and only having the option of nuking the HDD just to find out that the restore cd's will not put everything back as it once was.
