Microsoft’s long anticipated release of its next browser is finally coming to fruition around at the turn of the New Year. With it come upgrades in networking, increased multimedia functionality and a couple of other things… nothing which is going to cause you to upgrade from XP until at least the second Service Pack, in my opinion. However, there is one other little change from XP which we should take note of: A change in how their retail licenses can be used. Ed Bott, from ZDNet, has a great summary of these changes.

Here, Bott quotes the License Agreement for Windows Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate:

“Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device (physical hardware system). That device is the “licensed device.”

Now, for some businesses this won’t matter much. But for many consumers (and small businesses) who purchase retail machines loaded with an OEM license of the OS, this little change now means that you can only transfer that purchased license once… that’s it. Previously with Windows XP, you could transfer your OS license as many times as you wanted, as long as you erased the previous instance(s) of XP. With Vista, if you want to transfer an OEM/retail license to another machine (no matter what the reason), you can only do this once before your rights are used up.