Swapping MCE and XP round on two computers.

[pablo99]

I have a Compaq PC at home which has XP. I have just bought a Compaq C310 laptop which has Windows Media Centre installed. I have just made the recovery discs and I have the recovery discs made 2 years ago for the home PC.

I feel that the MCE is wasted on the laptop which is for my son at college. If it was on the home PC we could benefit from the whole media features and photo and movie steaming from the home PC to my XBOX360 which is connected to the lounge plasma

Can I format both PCs and recover them the other way round?

Would the recovery discs know it is not the machine they were made on?

It is not a problem to do this on the home PC as everything is backed up and I do it every year as part of "housekeeping" anyway.

As for the laptop it is brand new and has no data on it yet.

Will this work? I assume it's not dodgy? I do own both operating systems!!

Cheers

Pablo

[Singh400]

Are they recovery discs or OS install discs?

[smashie]

if the discs you have are operating system discs eg. windows xp home and a copy of windows media centre 2005 then yes you can use them on either set up as you own two licenses that you can install on any pc you see fit to, although it must be added that each operating system can only be installed on on pc at any given time, but if you have branded recovery discs eg. dell system recovery discs the may not work for you as they are designed to recover a specific piece of hardware back to its original factory state..

[pablo99]

They are recovery discs which I burned when I bought the PCs

They are both Compaq PCs? Does that make it work???

Pablo

[fraggle]

Originally Posted by pablo99

They are recovery discs which I burned when I bought the PCs

They are both Compaq PCs? Does that make it work???

Pablo

The recovery discs will *probably* be locked to a specific model (of laptop or home PC) and will refuse to recover anything else.

Even if they didn't do that they will re-install a customised version of Windows, customised with the correct drivers for that particular machine, and the chances of the old desktop having exactly the same hardware as the new laptop are about 0.0000002%!!

Having said that, you have in essence two OEM copies of Windows. So you can theoretically get hold of an OEM Windows XP and an OEM Windows MCE, download all the required drivers from the Compaq web site (if they make them available for download) and switch round that way.

You'll probably need to phone the MS helpline to switch the desktop license over to the laptop as its already been registered and nowadays you can only install on one machine, do it on a different machine and you need to phone them to get an unlock key.

In other words, yes you could do what you want to do, but it could be a heck of a headache.

[pablo99]

Originally Posted by fraggle

you could do what you want to do, but it could be a heck of a headache.

Yeah and I try to avoid headaches.

I'll leave it as is I think.

Cheers for the advice.

Pablo

[nightsoil]

I'm no expert but if these are OEM licenses then they are fixed to the original machines.

[fraggle]

Originally Posted by nightsoil

I'm no expert but if these are OEM licenses then they are fixed to the original machines.

I don't know if "fixed" is the right word.

If you've bought a laptop, say, with XP Pro OEM on it, and the machine dies, you can buy and build another machine (without OS) and then install the OEM XP Pro on it, phone MS, explain to them what's happened, what you've done, and they'll happily give you the "unlock" key to register your OEM OS on the new machine.

Of course, lying about it and having it on two machine is naughty, and I've no doubt will be discovered the first time something wants to do a "Genuine Advantage Validation" check.