Can I move Office XP to another machine?

I have MS Office XP which came bundled with my laptop. I am just about to purchase a new desktop and would rather have Office on that, having recently switched to using OpenOffice for day-to-day work. I only want MS Office available in case of compatability probs.

With MS policy and Product Activation technology, will I be able to install it on my new PC? The CD has “For distribution with a new PC only” printed on it, but does not mention if I must run it on that same PC.

Well, if MS had it their way, every person would have to buy their own individual copy of Office for each machine they owned. And each copy could only be installed once.

In your case though, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that since you own the CD, you’re ok to do with the CD as you please. So long as you uninstall Office from your laptop and run it exclusively on your desktop, then you should be in the right.

Keep in mind, IANAL, I’m just kinda arguing from fair use.

Well if you formatted your laptop and reinstalled Office on it, it wouldn’t really be new anymore, now would it? Or if you bought your laptop 1 year ago, and bought a new PC and installed the copy from the laptop on the new PC, with the statement, “For distribution with a new PC only”, you should be able to do it because your PC is new, right? Probably not a valid argument though. Not really the greatest statement to use on a CD label either. Maybe it should’ve said, “For use only for the PC it was originally installed on”.
Here’s how I see it. You paid for 1 license of Office. As long as your running 1 copy of Office on 1 machine and 1 machine only, there shouldn’t be a problem. Don’t hold me to it though.

Fair use is not the primary issue here. It’s a technical matter of how stringent the activation protection is. I’m not sure how much of a change MS has made in the last three years (when I got a pre-release OEM copy of Office XP with my new computer). It has always reinstalled properly and worked just fine on my computer as I’ve added cards and switched out/added hard and optical drives. I don’t know what it’s like now, but I do remember an early review of product-activated software (I think it was David Coursey from ZDNet) which said that once he disconnected the docking station of his laptop the whole thing (and it might’ve been the XP OS, not Office XP) stopped working.

What I would suggest would be to try it and if it doesn’t activate properly to try calling MS support. They might be able to activate you manually if you can somehow prove to them that the program is no longer being used on the original computer.

Oh, I should as that as far as I know, the activiation protection still works by taking a snapshot of your machine’s configuration (perhaps all the way down to the serial numbers of the motherboard and processor, if such a thing is possible.) Depending on what the protection is looking at, that could be your answer. That would also explain why I can make some small changes like adding a hard drive or replacing my CD burner and have it still work after a format and re-install. It’d even explain why it worked just fine when I upgraded my OS. But here’s Microsoft’s page on product activation, which would probably be more helpful than my half-remembered guessing.

The license for the retail version of Microsoft Office says that it can be installed on two computers (one of which needs to be a notebook system, and you need to be the user of both). The same page also says that for the pre-installed version, you need to contact the PC manufacturer to get the end user license agreement. I suspect, though, that the OEM license will not permit you to do so.

The Student and Teachers Edition costs about $130 and can be installed on up to three systems in your home.