As far as I know, Windows Vista/7 or XP cannot be deactivated. However if your vista is on a retail license you can just install onto another pc and activate it on there, if it is OEM, hard luck!

 

If it's a retail copy of vista then noe, no deactivation required. Just overwrite with windows 7 and put vista on the other machine and it should be fine

 

Not in accordance with their user agreement,but ive re-used oem when replacing *faulty* motherboards.

 

Legally you can not use it on anything other than the motherboard with which it is currently activated.

 

How do you do this? do you ring them up and tell them you have replaced your motherboard?

 

once you installed the operating system then, try to activate it it should pop a free phone number for to phone as well as some numbers, to do the activating over the phone , just say that the operating system is only installed onto one PC then you should get a number back to type in for activating at the end off it,

PS put your phone onto speaker phone a empty room is best.

 

What Siege2 says

Sometimes you won't even have to do that as it will activate online.

 

Will that work with an OEM product key though? The above works fine with retail versions, I've done that process on my retail copy of Vista Ultimate numerous times for numerous PCs (always been only one pc at a time though)... but not sure if that will work on OEM?

I'd like to know the outcome of this!

 

Yes it will work,i've lost count of how many times i have do it with punters pc's.

 

100%

 

Hmm, makes you wonder what the point in paying the extra for retail is huh!

 

I feel I should pop-in with the obligatory "if you're going to re-activate an OEM OS on another machine, you may as well just pirate it" comment.

 

pirate it, never copied my disc , just had hardware failures!