|
It shouldn't trigger a reactivation under normal circumstances. What happens when installing is that an installation ID is created. This installation ID is a mixture of your computer's various hardware devices and the product ID key of the XP you are running. The hardware ID key analyzes the types of your devices like processor (type and serial number), RAM amount, Display adapter, IDE and/or SCSI adapters, Hard drive and Hard drive volume serial, network MAC addresses and optical drives (CD/DVD and various readable devices) and then creates a hardware "fingerprint". These are the relevant hardware components - you could potentially keep changing your mouse, keyboard or floppy drives on a daily basis for all XP cares and you wouldn't be faced with a need to reactivate. The way it works is that for desktops with a network card you are allowed to change 6 components before reactivation is triggered (the number is 4 for desktops without a NIC). On top of it all, if you haven't made any changes for a year, the counter resets. Say you didn't change any hardware, and you wanted to format and install XP, you could reinstall XP an infinite number of times without needing reactivation.
As such, you can see that you should not need reactivation. However, as has been stated before, even if you do it's an impeccably painless procedure requiring a fone call.
WPA is not meant to create hassles for you - the owner of a legal copy of XP - who wants to change hardware, it is meant as a check to ensure that your copy of XP is legal - that's all.
HTH
|