Hey guys my knolage of softwear isent all that great su here i am asking questions filling patches up i currently have windows vista home preminum 64bit which is a OEM but i am thinking of hopping to 7 when it comes out the thing is i dont know what OEM means but i hear its ties to my mother board, would really be thankful to anyone who can explain this to me and thank you for any replays
Depends which OEM OEM where as restore disc comes with a pc which includes the operating system and other software is tied to that system and cant be changed to another system (normally comes with a prebuilt pc) OEM retail which is just the CD of the operating system only is also tied to the motherboard however with this you can change to another pc or motherboard if you activate via telephone with microsoft but either one you can wipe the disc clean and install 7 that wouldnt cause any issues at all
ok thanks for that i have vista oem on my system which isent a pre-built it is a OEM retail but would love to go with windows 7 i would have to phone microsoft up to sort it out right or would it just go stright over
If you buy Windows 7 OEM retail, then that is all. You must format your Windows Vista partition, loosing any data in that partition, and install Win7 (everything is done in the Windows setup, so no complications), it will be just as you install a normal software on your computer. It will be behave like if you had no previous Windows installed on your system. So you won't need to call Microsoft for anything, until you decide to change your motherboard (or system, as the motherboard is different)
ok thanks a lot guys, i have 1 last question would just a plain windows 7 retail work the same or would i have to get a oem?
Either will work. The install will be identical, the difference is that OEM is purchased with the intention of going on a specific computer with specific hardware. If you upgrade too much, or make a major change, then technically you should get a new OEM copy of Windows. If you go down the retail path, then you can install it on any computer you want at any time regardless of hardware etc. Of course, you can only have it installed on one computer at any moment in time! In both cases, if you reach your install limit, you can always phone up MS to sort it out and allow more. From the sound of it this is unlikely to be an issue however.
