Activation and Registration
There is a difference between activating Windows XP and registering it. Here are some facts to help you. First and foremost, activation is required and not optional if you want to use XP beyond 30 days. Registration is optional and not required.
What is
Activation?
In short, activation is an exchange of two mathematically computed codes between your computer and Microsoft that authorise XP to run on your machine. There are five main components to activation.
A Product Code. The OS contains the product code, which is installed on your HDD when you install the OS. Product codes are different for Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Pro, OEM licenses and volume licenses. They are not interchangeable. A Product Code is not a Product Key.
A Product ID (PID). The PID is generated by combining the Product Key that was supplied with your XP with the Product Code stored by the OS.
A Hardware ID (HWID). The HWID is generated by interrogating various hardware components on the computer. The values and codes that make up the HWID are based on serial numbers, volume IDs from hard disks and NIC MAC addresses (network cards).
An Installation Identifier (IID). The IID is a code that represents your OS installation and is made up of the HWID and the PID. The installation ID does not contain any personally identifiable information. It contains only a code that can be decoded to verify the components that make up the HWID.
A Confirmation Identifier. The activation software sends the IID to what Microsoft call a clearinghouse. It is a Windows server running Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Certificate Server. The clearinghouse takes the Installation ID and sends back a Confirmation Identifier (CID), which contains the digitally signed license number that activates XP. This license number can be decoded into the PID, HWID, IID and the Product Key.
What is Registration?
Registration is providing personal information about yourself to Microsoft and detailing what Microsoft products you own. Registration is entirely optional. If you register, Microsoft will send you newsletters, which you can selectively choose to receive or not receive. You also gain access to Microsoft's Bonus Center, where you can choose from free or discounted services or software that Microsoft sometimes makes available to registered customers. If you register online with Microsoft, they are able to notify you of new products, product updates, events, promotions, and special offers.
How Do I Activate?
If you choose to activate XP over the Internet, the activation system will detect your Internet connection and send your IID to Microsoft and receive back the CID. This process takes just a few seconds to complete. The process is, according to Microsoft, anonymous.
To activate Windows XP over the telephone, you can simply call Microsoft. A customer service representative will ask for the installation ID number displayed on the activation screen, enter that number into a database and provide you with a CID. Once the CID is entered, the manual activation process is complete. Check the documentation that came with your Windows XP for contact details.
According to Microsoft, telephone calls average two to three minutes duration, with hold times of two to three minutes or less. On average, over 70 percent of activations are conducted over the Internet. Approximately 2 percent of all activation requests are due to hardware changes or other reasons.
When Must I Activate?
You are asked to activate XP during the initial installation process. You can decline the request to activate at that time and do it later. Activation must be performed within thirty days of installing XP otherwise XP will not allow you to do anything other than activate. Simply click Start, point to All Programs, and then click Activate Windows to do it at a later time. You must have administrator rights to activate Windows XP.
The OS on a new PC from an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) may be activated in the factory. This means that you will never be asked to activate the system.
Can hardware components
be changed and upgraded?
Yes. Activation will tolerate a degree of change in your hardware configuration from when the OS was originally activated. You can change some hardware without the product believing it is on a different PC to the one it was activated on. If you completely upgrade the hardware by making substantial hardware changes, even over a long period of time, reactivation may be required. In that case, you can try to reactivate over the internet or contact Microsoft by telephone if need be.
How many
components can I change before reactivating?
Activation uses a voting mechanism. There are 10 hardware characteristics used in creating the HWID:
Display Adapter
SCSI Adapter
IDE Adapter
Network Adapter MAC Address
RAM Amount Range (i.e. 0-64mb, 64-128mb, etc)
Processor Type
Processor Serial Number
Hard Drive Device Type
Hard Drive Volume Serial Number
CD-ROM/CD-RW/DVD-ROM
Each characteristic is worth one vote, except the network card (NIC), which is worth three votes. When the current HWID is compared to the original hardware HWID, there must be a vote of 7 or more for the two HWIDs to be considered "in tolerance" on a desktop machine.
If the device is a laptop, additional tolerance is allowed and there need only be 4 matching points. Therefore, if the computer is a laptop and the network card is the same, only one other characteristic must be the same for a total vote of 4.
If the network card is the same, then only 4 additional characteristics must match because the network card is worth 3, for a total of 7 votes. This means, for a desktop system with both SCSI and IDE adapters, you can change five components. If you have only an IDE adapter, you can change four components, assuming you have all the others listed.
If the network card is not the same then, for a desktop machine, a total of 7 votes must be obtained from components other than the network card. So, if you have only an IDE adapter and no SCSI card, you can change one other component besides the NIC, assuming you have all the others listed.
You will also note that there is no mention of the motherboard or its chipset. Only the CPU processor type, serial number are considered, along with the IDE adapter if it is built-in to your motherboard, which is the norm with modern boards. This means that a simple motherboard change may or may not trigger a reactivation, depending on what else you change, such as taking the opportunity to go to a faster processor or add more RAM.
Can I avoid
reactivation if I format my hard disk and reinstall or do a repair
installation?
Yes. There are several things you can do.
If you are going to do a repair installation, there are two files named WPA.DBL and WPA.BAK. They are stored in the Windows\System32 directory. You can back these up, perform the repair installation of XP then put these two files back into the Windows\System32 directory. If all you have done is a repair installation, XP will be none the wiser. This procedure is said to work on a clean installation, but others categorically state this to be false.
The Hard Drive Volume Serial Number is stored on the first sector of a partition. If you format your boot partition for any reason, or convert from FAT/FAT32 to NTFS, the Hard Drive Volume Serial Number will change. Before you format, go to a command prompt and issue the Windows XP VOL command. You will get a response similar to the following:
Volume in drive C is Local Disk
Volume Serial Number is 30ED-49F9
In the above example, 30ED-49F9 is the volume serial number, or VSN. Record it. To restore the VSN, download the volumeid.exe from sysinternals.com and run it. Just give the small executable the old volume ID and you're done. You will need to reboot if you have NTFS.
Performing the above step is not critical, but it does preserve a yes vote. It may come in handy if you want to avoid reactivation and you have calculated from the information above that reactivation will be required because of one additional component change.
Finally, if you change your hard drive and reinstall XP to a different partion, you will lose two yes votes. You can preserve one yes vote by using the technique described above, but if you use imaging software, such as PowerQuest Drive Image 2002, you can retain both yes votes by imaging the drive, and either restoring XP to its original location or to a new location and retaining the old hard disk as a backup. If you format the old disk, it will lose its VSN and so you will lose a yes vote. This technique works because because WPA checks all drives and partitions for the VSN it is looking for.
Is it true that WPA
resets every 120 days?
Yes, it is. Every 120 days, WPA will audit the hardware listed above and generate a new HWID. Effectively this resets the changed hardware count to zero. This means that if you change say four components on the 119th day after the last HWID was generated and reactivation was not triggered by that change, then on the 120th day, you can change four more components without needing to reactivate.
Can I set my BIOS
clock forward to force a WPA reset?
Based on the decription above, it seems possible. I have not tested this and cannot speculate what might happen when you set your BIOS clock back to normal. If you use any service that synchronises time, you should disable it temporarily. Anyway, all that seems a lot of bother to go to merely to avoid anonymously sending a sequence of numbers that contain no personally identifiable information to a computer somwhere in the bowels of a Microsoft basement.
Revision Date: 28 Nov 2003