How many online activations on Windows 7 Ultimate Retail???

Sylver123

Sylver123

Sylver123

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Hello!

Does anyone know how many online activations do you get per product key on Windows 7 Ultimate Retail before the online activation limit is reached and you have to phone microsoft to reactivate???

To be honest, im not that keen on all this having to reactivate windows 7 every time i change my hardware :mad:

Thank you for responding.
 
It's been a similar system since Win XP and people are still struggling to understand it?

You can change hardware to a certain level before Windows says 'enough' and asks you to reactivate. With XP it was 3 hardware changes I believe (so CPU, RAM and GPU for instance) and you got 3 reactivations before you had to phone. I've no idea if Vista and 7 are the same, but I was never asked to reactivate Vista (changed a few hard drives, added a bit of RAM).

In short, no, if you only change your graphics card once you won't need to reactivate, but if you change a few more parts, it will trigger a reactivation notification.

Personally, I just use the rearm trick until I have to activate 4 months after the initial install. That allows a nice buffer for hardware issues to surface and time to sort them.
 
this_is_gav said:
It's been a similar system since Win XP and people are still struggling to understand it?

With XP it was 3 hardware changes I believe (so CPU, RAM and GPU for instance) and you got 3 reactivations before you had to phone.
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Ive never had any problems with XP and ive changed hardware a lot more than 3 times
 
I think it was N changes within a certain time ... so if you changed, say, three things and then don't change anything for 6 months then the counter is reset and you don't need to phone if you change something else.

I have boxes where I changed quite a few parts over time and whilst I have to occasionally had to reactivate online I've never had to phone.
 
I believe that is the case, but once you got on to the point where you have to phone you never got back off it.

Must have had 2 only reactivate two or three times over two XP licences. I remember windows audio disabling itself and then it wanted me to reactive, I even had to ring up, it was only the second time I had activated too. It always seemed very random to me.
 
On XP i have changed motherboard, cpu, ram, graphics card, hard drives all at ones. I have also taken out my cpu and re-fitted it a few times in a row when it wasnt on right or i had too much/little paste on it.
 
I have changed gpus, cpus, hard drives numerous times without the need to reactivate. This was Vista HP.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
Why not?

You have a set limit of online activations (I forget how many), but if that fails, you can always phone, which is unlimited.
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Because I own genuine windows xp volume license version that didn`t need online activation, and you can change any hardware you like without having to reactivate online.

I never bothered with windows vista, so im not use to this activation limit thing with windows.
 
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It is a very complex set of rules that determines if and how you need to activate. It is not as clear cut as saying y9ou have 5 activations online then you need to call in (which is a 5 min process anyway). It will mainly depend on how close time wise your activations are.
 
JAMAL said:
All this activation rubbish is pathetic.
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I disagree, without it I'd have to pay more for legitimate software due to the higher levels of piracy that happen when it's not there. It can always be circumvented, but there are plenty of folks who don't want to chance dodgy fixes and OS versions in this day and age of internet fraud.

You can reinstall several time, I've done it 3 times already since the release of Windows 7 without any problems, it's always activated fine online. Kept buying new hard disks and wanted the fastest one as boot :p

Over the phone activation is painless too so even if you do ever run out of automatic activations it's not a huge problem.
 
Kami said:
I disagree, without it I'd have to pay more for legitimate software due to the higher levels of piracy that happen when it's not there. It can always be circumvented, but there are plenty of folks who don't want to chance dodgy fixes and OS versions in this day and age of internet fraud.

You can reinstall several time, I've done it 3 times already since the release of Windows 7 without any problems, it's always activated fine online. Kept buying new hard disks and wanted the fastest one as boot :p

Over the phone activation is painless too so even if you do ever run out of automatic activations it's not a huge problem.
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