Licensing for Dual Boot

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bill Martin
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Bill Martin

This may be slightly off topic for the XP board, but people here seem
to know more about Microsoft licensing than elsewhere.

My Office 2003 is licensed to run on three machines, and it is
installed on my three macines, and all is well. I've now set up one
of the machines as a Vista/XP dual boot.

If I install Office on both OS partitions, does Microsoft's licensing
count that as one machine or two? Which is to say, if I install it
under both partions will Microsoft now claim that I need a total of 4
licenses rather than 3?

Thanks.

Bill
 
Bill Martin said:
This may be slightly off topic for the XP board, but people here seem
to know more about Microsoft licensing than elsewhere.

My Office 2003 is licensed to run on three machines, and it is
installed on my three macines, and all is well. I've now set up one
of the machines as a Vista/XP dual boot.

If I install Office on both OS partitions, does Microsoft's licensing
count that as one machine or two? Which is to say, if I install it
under both partions will Microsoft now claim that I need a total of 4
licenses rather than 3?

Thanks.

Bill
Click to expand...

An installation on one partition is one installation of your "3 licenses."
If you install onto another partition on the same computer that is a second
install.

Directly from EULA " A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a
separate device."

The way I look at this is that if you have to activate it again on the same
machine with a second co-existing operating system, it is a separate install
and an additional license is needed.
 
An installation on one partition is one installation of your "3 licenses."
If you install onto another partition on the same computer that is a second
install.

Directly from EULA " A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a
separate device."

The way I look at this is that if you have to activate it again on the same
machine with a second co-existing operating system, it is a separate install
and an additional license is needed.
Click to expand...
-----------------------

That's why it's foggy to me. It's not two seperate hardware
partitions - it's all on one disk, one piece of hardware. And for
that matter, I can tell XP to install it on the Vista partition and
access it from there if that makes Microsoft happier.

There's really no reason to install it a second time anyhow. It's all
the exact same set of files which would be in the same locations. It's
just that XP needs to build its own registry entries to point to the
Excel that's already there for Vista. The only way I know how to
accomplish that is to "install" Office over top of the existing
Office.

That doesn't seem like two machines to me, but I wondered if someone
here had actually dealt with the problem already.

Bill
 
Bill Martin said:
-----------------------

That's why it's foggy to me. It's not two seperate hardware
partitions - it's all on one disk, one piece of hardware. And for
that matter, I can tell XP to install it on the Vista partition and
access it from there if that makes Microsoft happier.

There's really no reason to install it a second time anyhow. It's all
the exact same set of files which would be in the same locations. It's
just that XP needs to build its own registry entries to point to the
Excel that's already there for Vista. The only way I know how to
accomplish that is to "install" Office over top of the existing
Office.

That doesn't seem like two machines to me, but I wondered if someone
here had actually dealt with the problem already.

Bill
Click to expand...

Well, if you attempt to install and activate on three individual machines
back to back (within MS's 120 day activation window) the activation with
your version would go flawlessly. However if you then attempted to install
to another partition on the same machine the 4th on-line activation will
fail.
 
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