...to be advised today during bootup that I needed to reactivate Windows within 3 days. This was a week or so following warnings that my main HD was about to fail. It was making occasional odd chirping noises and then started spinning down spontaneously and refusing to restart unless I shutdown the system for 20-30 minutes. Fortunately I managed to achieve an exact up-to-date copy of the drive's contents onto a larger replacement while it was still working, so I was spared having to restore and update an older image backup. The replacement drive is also a Deskstar (now Hitachi 7K250, previously IBM 120GXP) but much larger capacity (160GB compared with the previous 60GB).Effectively this became a HD upgrade, but does this really constitute a significant hardware change under Windows XP's Product Activation conditions?This has been the first time after two years whereby I have needed to reactivate Windows and I was pleased to discover how painless the procedure turned out to be. It took only seconds over the Internet!CASPER XPDuring the course of this hiccup in my computing life I came across an extremely useful utility by the name of "Casper XP":http://www.fssdev.com/products/casperxp/This superb program allows you to perform drive/partition backups while working in the Windows environment. Not only that, but you are spared having to prepare a new HD prior to copying over another drive's contents. It will recognize the virgin drive, allow you to create, size/resize and format partitions and then perform the copy - all while you continue to work in Windows! Brilliant and, to my mind, now an essential and welcome addition to my drive management armoury.Mike

Luckily for you it didn

i acidentally flashed my BIOS with the wrong file, the PC did boot up but was running very sick, to add insult to injury i had to phone M$ to reactivate it. it was not a big deal and if i had had a bit longer than 3 days to system would nave been restored to its original state. fortunatly when i put the proper chip back in i did not have to reactivate the system.