Maximum PC

My kitchen laptop is seriously showing its age and I plan to retire it very soon and replace it with a new build in an HTPC case and leftover LCD monitor. While the three pack license for Windows 7 Home Premium is on sale, I would like to pick that up as I will need one new license. I would like to donate the other two (retail not OEM) Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade licenses to part of the family in another state. They currently have Vista on their machines. So the question is....

Can I swap the license keys out on two W7HPU machines for the three seat W7HPU license key without a reinstall etc? I know that most likely there would be a call to MS to reactivate the old ones for the Vista upgrades, but not a big deal on that.

I think you can install it on whatever machine you want... but it has to be licensed to you?

I am not sure I follow you. You can transfer non OEM Windows licenses to other machines without issue. It does require a call to the activation line and I haven't had to speak to a person in years through that process it is pretty painless if not slow.

Can you more clearing state what machines you have and what OS they have, and where you want to upgrade to?

I'll try to clarify a bit. My brother has two Vista OS computers he wants to upgrade to Win 7 Home Premium Upgrade. I currently have two Windows 7 HPU computers, but I am building a third. So I need one more license. The three user Win 7 HPU is currently selling for almost the same as a single. In trying to keep within the spirit of the three user household phrase in the EULA I wanted to use the three pack in my household and give my current two licenses to the brother so that he can upgrade his Vista computers.

To further clarify, I do not want to change computers, upgrade, or reinstall anything on my end. I just want to change the license key on two Win 7 Home Premium Upgrade machines.....then, build the new PC and use the third activation of the three user key for it. No OEM licenses are involved...they are all retail. As for my computers, they are all home built, dual and quad core, so of course never had OEM licenses.

Even if I could do it and make it work, I would not want to share a three user license outside of the house. I think it would be asking for trouble down the road, thus the idea of just swapping the license keys. That way they get their own install disks, license key and get to talk to the MS robot.

I'm familiar with the reactivation. Recently did it moving a Vista license to another special use PC in the house. It is a bit of a slow process, but did not have any hold time and it worked on the first try 10-15 minutes I would guess.

So if this makes better sense, the next question is how to change the license key?

Just found this link from Microsoft, so it appears that the practice is accepted by Microsoft.

http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/selfhe ... 211a17628a[quote][/quote]

I don't see any reason why you couldn't just update the project keys. It's not like you have ultimate installed and then replacing it with a home premium key...which I'm not sure what would occur there, but one would think there'd be a problem because of the supersets that MS has created. Unfortunately, there really isn't a way to deactivate a key in any sense., so you'll probably be stuck with a call in any sense.