34 days grace period?

[octavius]

Dear friends,

I recently bought a new computer, worked with it for a couple of weeks and had a failure of the primary hard disk.

I decided to install one of my IDE hard disks which I have left over from other times and installed a copy of Vista Home Premium from a MS DVD which I have. I did so on February 15, 2010.

A couple of days later, I got myself a new SATA HDD from my favorite store, installed that one as well and reconfigured the BIOS to boot from the new HDD. I put Windows 7 professional on this machine.

The Vista environment on the IDE HDD is still available for me if I change the HDD preference in the bios. I do so occasionally, especially as I didn’t bother to install iTunes on the Win 7 machine.

Interestingly enough, SLMGR tells me that my Vista grace period expires on March 22nd, 2010, although I’m pretty sure I installed the OS on Feb 16th.

Why is that? Do I now have a 34-days grace period?

Can I extend that grace period with the rearm command as I used to do back in 2007? I have SP 2 installed in the Vista environment.

Any help is appreciated.

[jwenting]

If you have a valid license key, just activate it.
If you don't, you're using a pirated copy whether you claim to have a real CD or not, and deserve no help (in fact you'd deserve a major spanking).

[octavius]

If you have a valid license key, just activate it.
If you don't, you're using a pirated copy whether you claim to have a real CD or not, and deserve no help (in fact you'd deserve a major spanking).

Dear jwenting,

Your reply is absolutely *NOT* helpful. In fact, it is just crap.

Nevertheless, as you are more experienced than me in this forum, I'll be polite and explain my situation.

I have a valid license for Vista Ultimate Edition which is no longer in use as the machine where I had installed it broke down in January 2010. Indeed, that was the reason why I bought a new computer in the first place. That Vista Ultimate was an official, expensive retail edition. I have the legal right to transfer my Vista copy to another machine.

So I am definitely NOT using a pirate copy. You question my motives (although you know nothing about me) and even imply that I am a pirate, and that attitude of yours is simply disgusting.

I also have another Vista retail copy, this time Home Premium, and I installed that on a laptop which I still use occasionally, but not very frequently.

As I described in the original posting (not sure whether you bothered to read it), I put Windows 7 professional on my new machine. That Windows 7 version, too, is a full retail product, not an upgrade. Of course, I have activated Win 7, so that's no problem at all.

I am not yet too familiar with Windows 7 and decided that I would like to keep a Vista environment as a second choice, at least for the time being. I can change between Win 7 and Vista by modifying the order of boot drives in the BIOS setup. If the machine boots from HDD 2, I get Win 7. If the machine boots from HDD 0, I get Linux. If it boots from HDD 1, I get Vista.

This is probably not a very professional boot manager, but I work with Windows 7 90% of the time and intend to put the new Ubuntu distribution which will be out pretty soon on HDD 2 as well, so that I have a boot manager between Win 7 and Ubuntu.

Which brings us back to the question what I can do with the Vista environment which I installed for the time being.

Given the fact that it was possible to rearm Vista three times, I can use the familiar Vista environment for almost 4 month before I decide what to do with it.

I might become so fond of Win 7 that I may eventually delete the Vista partition on HDD 1 altogether, but not yet.

I have to admit that I installed Vista from the Home Premium DVD that I activated on the laptop. I have the Ultima license left over, but as far as I know, an Ultimate key won't work on an Home Premium installation.

Now that I have explained my situation I would like some serious advice and, please, no more crap.

It has crossed my mind that I might be able to activate my (temporary?) Vista partition with the product key that came with the retail version for Home Premium. That would probably work, but according to my understanding, it would not be in full compliance with the license agreement. I already installed Home Premium on the Laptop, and it is the Ultimate edition for which I have the license left over. However, if you recommend this course of action, I will not complain.

I am not interested in re-installing Vista at this time to get the full benefits of the Ultimate edition.

Regards
Octavius