Were I to get Win7, which should I go with?

Actually, that IS getting used to it.

EDIT: I don't know why we are even posting replies - it's like he just wants to argue with all of us that keep up with technology and really know what we are talking about.

I actually have a little faith in game companies; whereas if we can help eliminate the ripoff artists (Gamestop and the like) where developers are making more money due to lack of used game sales, that we might see more direct sales for digital versions regularly.

We've have OEM versions of Windows on virtually very PC we've ever owned, since Archie built our first one back in 1993. It has never, not once, been a problem.

I call shenanigans on whatever you've seen on Amazon. Oddly, I can't find anything along those lines in reviews on Amazon, but if you have somewhere found something like that, the person that posted it is lying through their teeth.

Simply replacing a hard drive will not trigger the reactivation. As Hyperstrike said, it requires replacing a significant amount of hardware to trigger the reactivation query.

I've been a tech since 1993 (not to mention the several years before that of starting to tinker and learn hardware) and have built several systems, rebuilt several systems and done minor hardware upgrades and replacements. Not just for myself but for friends, family, strangers and even some of the companies I've worked for.

In that time, I've had to call Microsoft exactly 2 times for activation problems. One of those was because someone had written the license key down in a way that made it difficult to tell if it was a B or an 8 in the key. The other was due to an electrical storm frying the system less than 4 months after it was built and having to replace everything in the computer. As soon as I said "electrical storm" and mentioned where the customer lived the Microsoft rep apologized for the problems in registration and activated the license in their system. He told me that the only reason it had triggered was due to the major number of hardware ID's changing and how recently the OS had been registered. Total time of call? 10 minutes. I was browsing some tech articles while I made the call. I'd have been reading those articles anyway, so no real loss of my time.

Oh yeah, and both of these problems were on Windows XP. I've yet to have a problem with activations on either Vista or Windows 7.

You asked for advice, were given advice, then made a ridiculous statement that was shot down by several people that are computer techs. You came back in with more FUD posting and again the techs gave you accurate information to shoot down those posts. And yet you still want to act like you're being wronged because we are giving you truthful and accurate information to correct the misinformation you've gotten elsewhere.

You take the cake.

*facepalm*

If it reactivates a system for you, and you can be browsing, watching a movie, or whatever while you're doing it, how exactly is it a waste of time? You're talking 5-10 minutes depending on whether or not you need to talk to a real person.

And so we're clear.

You'd have to do the same thing WITH A RETAIL COPY if enough hardware IDs change.

Can we come to the REAL reason you're so averse to this, rather than a bunch of lame excuses.


Whatever. It's your money, time and effort to waste.


*SIGH*

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People were talking about you choosing Windows XP 64 bit edition. The horrible bastardization of a Windows Server variant, that was largely DoA because it wasn't shipped by virtually anyone (certainly not on a consumer system), and had horrible driver support. According to Valve's Steam Hardware Survey, Windows XP 64bit has less than half the number of users of OS X Snow Leopard... That's not even the current version of OS X! Mind you, to upgrade to the latest version is a grand total of $20, and can be done with just a few clicks of the mouse (it can be bought in the Mac App Store, downloaded, and installed very quickly).

That is what people were talking about as a bad idea. And, personally, I'd still recommend against installing Windows 7 into a second partition. I've done that in the past (with prior versions of Windows), and there's a lot of software that does not expect that and will freak out (because virtually no one does that). Swapping the HDs, IMO, is a far better testing solution, as it'll let you avoid any incompatibilities.

Where 'game' is 'game by company that has paid $MANUFACTURER (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) a huge amount of money, gone through a very lengthy/arbitrary approval process, and then laced the game with absurd amounts of DRM'. You can't run any game unless explicitly approved by $MANUFACTURER, or any other software. You might not realize it, but all modern consoles are just general purpose computers (the PS3 was even advertised as such!), laced with huge amounts of DRM. Actually, scratch 'modern', consoles were general purpose computers since their birth, just laced with DRM a few generations after their birth.

From the rest of your description, it doesn't sound like you have any problems with DRM itself, just poorly functioning functionality. You'll get DRM either way, except consoles just ensure you can't avoid it.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

Not to mention that he seems have made some of the stuff up. At the very least, it's contradictory to the personal experience of multiple other people. Seriously, though, it started out okay but became a rant. At that point, it's no longer subject to rational thought or discussion.

The fact remains, however, that there is a very good reason for replying - correcting misinformation so that someone else doesn't come along and get inaccurate information from this thread. We can't convince a ranter, but we can present useful information for a hypothetical clueless person who reads this thread because they have the same question.

Tangent: I haven't used the 2012 edition, but Acronis has given me some unexplainable fits over the years and sometimes it just plain sucks up too much resources while its backing up for some reason, so I moved to ShadowProtect. Acronis' interface is a lot better, but I've found ShadowProtect to be much more bulletproof. That's important in any continuous incremental backup system and periodic verify is nice. A combination of the two would probably be the perfect backup solution.

Although, part of my opinion of both is due to the fact that I have to use these things in enterprise environments as well, and in enterprise environments I think SP is significantly more solid than Acronis.

Actually it's a little more sensative than that, BUT...it's way easier to fix than that sounds. Simply put, it involves a touchtone phone, patience to deal with an automated system (still easier than That sounds), and the ability to see and type. I've probably done that 2-3 times in the last year (ok, so I lost track of which laptop had which license...) and the whole double checking the verification numbers is what took the longest.

A thousand times THIS. I always create a baseline (OS + hardware drivers only) image of my windows installation and then I'll do a +Software image as well once I install my core software.

I'm sure that Acronis must be decent as it was mentioned, but something I found out the hard way was that Win7 uses a different version of NTFS than XP and my older cloning software couldn't see the drive to clone my mom's laptop when she got it. I had to deal with the builtin windows backup that worked, but when I had to use it to restore her system (I forget what the issue was, probably a bloody IE toolbar she DL) it resulted in losing the system's recovery partition (that 200mb partition Win7 creates on a fresh install).

For reference, I've been using Avanquest's Partition Commander and Perfect Image for a number of years now.

As for XP Mode, unless you're wanting to run something that requires 3D graphics, then you could also create a virtual machine separate from XPM so that you don't screw that up, but unless we know What you're wanting to preserve, then there's no way we can give you an absolute answer. IE: There's no way for me to run my circa Win95 games on anything beyond true XP and since I still love them, then that's a killjoy. That said, unless it's a laptop, then I could just nab a small drive to put XP on. Dual-boot works, but it can get annoying after a while and if you do it install the older OS first.

I'm not actually using Acronis as an installed backup tool.

I'm booting off the Acronis disk, and just making an image of the entire drive.

And yes, I don't care for Acronis' enterprise offerings. But for imaging a single system, the regular True Image works just fine.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Why yes. Yes there is!

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.