Rocky Moore wrote:

It is offical though, "retail" versions of Vista may only be transferred to one future box forever! I had thought this would only apply to OEM (which would make more sense), but it is not, it is for th retail version. Gamers who update their systems more than most people change socks will get bit hard by this one.

I think the most powerful source of complaints toward this new licensing scheme will be the hardware retailers. I can imagine that this policy could cause computer hardware sales to decline. I know I would be much more reluctant to upgrade my PC if I knew I'd need to purchase a new OS license. I'd be interested to see what happens if hardware sales do decline as a result. Pressure from major companies who include Windows on their prebuilt machines, who in turn received pressure from hardware manufacturing companies could be the deciding factor for Microsoft to change this license restriction. Microsoft would be really feeling the hurt if these companies started offering other non-Microsoft OS packages as an alternative or replacement.

Well one thing is for sure: you won't catch me downloading this Service Pack until they get the Release Notes back up. I want to know exactly what this thing is doing before I install it. I really don't feel like re-imaging my PC because my registry got irrevocably deranged. X|

Wow, that really stinks for me. I have quite the old PC game collection, but sadly they're all on CD. I have games dating back to the early 90's. Most of them amazingly still work on Windows XP, but I have an old 486 just in case. The point is, some of these things have copy protection on them so that you can't copy them to a new CD. You can copy the files to a hard drive, but the copy-protection doesn't transfer so when you try to install from the hard drive, it won't work. What would you all suggest in this situation?