I have a co-worker with a 4-PC Windows XP Home network at his house.
He has some strange networking problems, including PC #2 having trouble seeing PC #3 and vice versa, while the other PCs on the LAN are able to connect to PC #3 or PC #2.
He believes that he may have accidentally registered 2 of the XP machines using the same product activation key. Bear in mind, he has 4 licenses, but probably got confused in the shuffle.
It is my assertion that your product activation key being redundant on your network would not cause the kind of problems that he is talking about.
Microsoft will allow or not allow your system to activate based on piracy concerns, but I don’t believe they have intentional network crippling built into their product activation scheme. Does anyone have a credible cite supporting or refuting my belief here?
Ghosting or otherwise cloning the Windows installation from one PC’s hard drive to another could cause networking problems. Using the same license wouldn’t. If the drives were cloned, he’ll have to use sysprep on one system to get it to recreate the SIDs. Otherwise, it’s just a network config issue.
Tourbot:
I believe you. Makes sense to me. Is there a citation for that I can use?
From Symantec’s Ghost Knowledgebase:How to change the SID on a Windows XP, Windows 2000, or Windows NT computer.
Microsoft’s documentation for sysprep can be found here.
Read the docs, there are consequences to using sysprep. Also, be sure to download the latest version of sysprep if this is XP, there were some bugs in the pre SP1 version.
Thank you, Tourbot.