Vista software compatibility concerns and license restrictions…



I should say that George Ou has been trying to put to rest some of the concerns people have about “will xyz program run on vista”. The All About Microsoft blogpost on virtual PC seems to have started all this. I should say that virtual machines seem to be a good way to make sure that whatever “ye olde application” doesn’t work perfectly well in a new OS can still run. (I have a couple of old DOS applications that I’ve revisited this way.) (By the way, this is a question many people ask whether it’s a new version of windows or if they run other Operating Systems..) I was a bit more interested to read about some of the licensing terms for the various Vista flavors…


It looks like the terms of the Vista license will be a bit more restrictive than XP. The OS can only be moved to another hardware set once. Also Home Basic and Home Premium will be restricted from running in a Virtual Machine (although I’m not certain how or IF they’ll be enforcing this by trying to detect an emulated environment.)

I think it’s interesting. A lot of people were concerned about the way XP deals with hardware changes and after three or more components are changed within X number of days you have to re-authorize the OS… it appears the screws are tightening a bit more.

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