XP pr Vista for gaming machine?

[Penguin]

Ok, well I will be building a new computer in the near future and have a couple of questions.
1) if I rebuild my current computer and transfer my XP Pro operating system to it, how do I go about making it legal? I think I remeber a couple of years back where you had to call Microsoft to chnage the liscense information or something. Does anyone know how to do this?

2) My new machine will be used for home computing and gaming. So woudl it be better to stay with XP Pro or upgrade to Vista?

Thanks

[TwoRails]

For #1, you just call or go online to reactivate it. For obvious legal purposes, just make sure you don't let some your your old HD as a system drive.

For #2, there is a lot of good arguments either way. I prefer XP as it is faster but vista has DX10 which is important to many. To see some discussion on this topic in general, check out this thread:

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=186294

[Penguin]

So if I were to build another computer and install my current XP onthe hard drive, I can just do an online register just like I just bought it?

I know that you aren't allowed to have XP on 2 machines and once the new machine is running, this one will be junked for parts.

I thought XP was suppose to have this huge new registration protocol to help curb piriting?

[TwoRails]

Well... call it an upgrade and then the answer to your first question is yes. XP is not bad at all about upgrading. I usually do it on the phone and it takes only minutes. The whole pirating thing is to not let others use it. Over the years, this system has morphed many times but never once as a total new build, just component swaps and XP has never left this machine.

[Statica]

Product activation used to be a bigger deal .. then people got used to it. However, it also depends on your original XP license and your original machine. For example, if it was a Dell and a Dell provided CD that you then transfer over to a custom build .. it wont work.