You have thirty days to activate a new installation of Microsoft Windows XP before it stops working until you finally activated the installation. Activation works this way that you have to provide an installation number to Microsoft either by internet or by phone. If you change hardware or install the operating system again you will have to activate the product again as well. This does not make sense in my opinion but hey, they surely have an important reason for this procedure.
Now as I said earlier there is a way to reinstall Windows XP without having to activate the product again. Windows XP creates two files when the activation process was successful: wpa.dbl and Wpa.bak – those two files are normally located in your system32 folder of your windows installation. You need to back them up because they hold the information that Windows is already active.
Install Windows XP again or use a backup. After that is finished and you see that Windows is not activated start Windows in minimal safe mode. Navigate to the system32 directory and rename the files wpa.dbl and Wpa.bak to something else, for example wpa2.dbl and Wpa2.bak.
Now copy your backed up wpa.dbl and Wpa.bak into the folder, reboot windows and you will realize that Windows is again activated. This only works of course if you do not change relevant hardware like the motherboard for instance. If that is the case you will have to activate Windows again.
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You are a genious If I said it once I will say it again :)
Thank You for the tip.
The tip described in the last two paragraphs seems doesn’t work if I install or restore xp to a different hard disk (even if they are on the same machine).
Might work with similar hard drives if the Volume Serial ID and file system (NTFS) format is identical. In other words, use tools to duplicate the partition to new drive, or build similar partition, install XP, then modify the Serial ID with the correct tools… this is not the Volume name, but the Volume Serial Number like 843C-3D55 displayed in a command prompt “dir” listing. With a similar partition and VSN, the backup activation should not detect a change of hardware, unless XP looks deeper into the hard disk architecture.