I think you are asking because you bought a box with preinstalled Vista
and the manufacturer and MSFT cooperated to make sure you got no Vista DVD
for your hard earned cash. Am I correct?
I don't think this is Daniel's reasoning, Chad, as he's indicating that he
wants to be able to do a clean install without activating. If he has no
restore media, then he would have no means of doing so and having an
activation file would be meaningless. Even a restore partition is sufficient
for this process, though still requires reactivation. No, I think - and
Daniel can confirm or deny this - that he just wants to be able to clean
install without having to reactivate.
Strikes me as sort of odd that people are willing to spend an hour or so
reinstalling, and another hour (at a minimum, more like 3-4 in some cases)
reconfiguring and reinstalling software, but are not willing to spend the
few moments it requires to reactivate (and it's something that doesn't even
need to be done immediately in order to use the machine). While I'm no fan
of this requirement or Microsoft's perceived need for it, I don't find the
actual steps needed to accomplish it to be any encumberance.
--
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
Windows help -
www.rickrogers.org