What is the limit of reinstalling XP on your PC??? The reason is that for ME.. I simply like to reinstall it maybe every 6 months or so as you get a lot of crap that accumulates on your Pc. The reason I ask this Is because I reinstalled it again last night and this time it tells me that the genuine advantage told me my XP was not valid. And I know for a fact it was. I actually bought this from Microsoft itself. I ended up having to do the phone activation thing. But what is the deal on this?/ is there a limit to the internet activation?? Am I going to have issues from here on out now??

Yes there is a limit and yes you will need to do the phone thing each time you reinstal. Unless you save the appropriate activation file and manually reinsert it after each instal. I don't have the exact details but a bit of searching under the subject "save Activation file" will probably locate the info you need I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

np lilimits ... to avoid re-activating you may want to create 2 partitions, make a neat fresh installation of your OS, drivers and software on drive C, point the 'my documents' and email storage folder to the d drive, then make an image of your c drive (using ghost) ... this way you avoid activation all the time ... and it saves you literally hours and hours and you will not loose any of your data on D when overwriting your C drive again and again :-) ... restoring your c drive with ghost is only a matter of minutes. as for WGA ... google for a tool called removeWGA ... nothing wrong with that. having WGA disaabled does NOT make you a software pirate! Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.' icq 10183575

WGA again ... you will get WGA only if you have your automatic updates turned on ... if you don't want WGA on your PC, you turn auto updates off and get only the updates you really want from 'unofficial websites like www.softwarepatch.com and install them manually. Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.' icq 10183575

Regarding softwarepatch website, someone mentioned (in a recent thread at CN) that when he/she ran one patch it invoked WGA validation check. I believe that the only reason why M$ hasn't taken down softwarepatch is because they agreed to M$ terms. BTW I hardly remember the message number :-) i_XpUser

softwarepatch.com is only one of many such sites, where you can obtain all updates ever released ... single or bundled. Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.' icq 10183575

Before the install do this and you won't have to re-activate. Right click Start and click Explore. In Windows Explorer, navigate to \WINDOWS\System32\ (usually on the c: drive but may be on a different drive depending on where you installed XP). Copy the following files to a floppy, CD or second hard disk: wpa.dbl, wpa.bak. To restore the files, start the computer in Safe Mode and copy them to the same directory (\WINDOWS\System32). http://computervitals.com/