Last night I had a complete nightmare. In my office I have 3 computers - 2 desktops and a laptop. The laptop is used rarely, and is really only for when I am away or needing to present to someone. The main machine is my workhorse, and the 2nd machine is just a machine which is used now and then.

However. What I do have on the 2 desktops is swappable drives, so I actually have 6 drives to use in 2 machines. I do this because it's easier than having 5 or 6 machines all on the go at the same time. If I need some info from a different disk I can just swap disks, or I can use the 2nd machine with the correct disk in it…

I decided to install Windows XP Home overwriting Win98 (I had not used the Win98 disk in ages). Of course, I did not think that having 2 machines would cause much of a problem.

So, I purchased an "upgrade" version of `Home` & installed it on the secondary machine - it went on very smoothly, absolutely no problem, but was very slow (my secondary machine is not that powerful, only a small processor and 384 of ram). I then decided to try the disk on my workhorse machine (this machine has a much bigger processor and 2gig of ram etc etc - it's a proper `muscle computer`).

So, I just take out my usual disk from `muscle` and insert the newly installed disk. Switch it on and it all goes smoothly until I try to login into windows. Oh oh, some error message about "you have significantly changed your hardware, this version of windows will self combust in 3 days" or some such message. Of course, I am a dummy, I should have realised this. So, I call up the MS licensing automated thing and relicense the software to the new hardware…

Except that this is impossible. Because I had already licensed the software to the previous machine, MS decided I was being fraudulent - I was automatically put through to a call center (in India) - and proceeded to explain my problem. I have one disk, with one install of XP Home - the person on the other end couldn't get their head around the idea of swappable drives…

In the end I had to agree that I could only use XP on one machine or the other, and then they would relicense the software as appropriate. As it was so slow on the secondary computer, I decided to run it only on my muscle machine. A few seconds later and it was working again (they gave me a very long code to input)…

I suppose it's fair enough to cut down on fraud, but really I was a bit annoyed (mainly at myself) for installing it in the 1st place. Never again shall I submit to the Dark Side of XP Home (says he, whilst typing this using XP Pro)