Making disc images

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 08:54:01AM -0500, Mike Kallies wrote:
> The licensing can burn you too.  It's important to go by the book.
> 
> If they're really identical and they all have OEM licenses, and you
> generated the image from an OEM preload, consider some of the parameters
> on sysprep to ensure that the license keys are unique on the machines.
> 
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302577
> 
> If you don't do this, Windows Genuine Advantage(tm) might give your
> users serious problems in the near future.  My info might be out of
> date, so it might take a bit more research for the latest fixpacks and
> WGA stuff.
> 
> As an aside... back in the day, Microsoft told me that the OEM licenses
> did not permit "advanced" imaging techniques, and that even though a
> machine shipped with XP Professional, it was not permissible to blow
> away the crap-filled factory image and put a fresh copy on the machine.
>  You had to either do a "factory restore" or buy a new corporate
> license.  The information about this would come with the original media
> Microsoft would have shipped from which the clone master was generated.

I seem to remember reading that volume licensing was in fact based on
the idea that the machines already had OEM windows licenses, so you
were essentially paying your volume license to allow upgrading to a more
flexible or perhaps newer windows version on all your machines and to
permit imaging to be used.

> Remember too, that it's "piracy" to create more than one backup copy of
> the "original media" or to distribute copies to support staff unless
> your agreements expressly permit it.
> 
> If there are additional complex considerations, opaque licenses to
> unravel, artificial costs and artifically inflated efforts involved in
> doing things legally, then it should be factored into the cost of the
> Microsoft platform.

Confusing and frequently changing.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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