Vista license transfers not as restrictive as initially reported

Those of you planning on upgrading to Windows Vista in January -- and yes, despite the supposed delay in shipments to hardware manufacturers, the commercial version of the OS is still on track for the stated rollout -- will be happy to learn that the seemingly unfair limitation on license transfers will not be nearly as severe as we first reported. According to a spokesperson in Microsoft's Licensing Department, simply swapping out a component such as a CPU or graphics card will not require you to re-activate Vista; only replacing a hard drive plus another piece of your rig at the same time will necessitate a re-activation. And instead of the single license transfer stipulation that we'd heard before, Redmond has now gone on record saying that you can re-install Vista up to 10 times without penalty -- and possibly more, though that will apparently be decided on a case-by-case basis. Of course, you still won't be able to pay for one copy Vista and run it on multiple machines simultaneously; but hey, that's to be expected, and trying it will get you every bit of functionality-crippling frustration that you deserve.