What I was suggesting is that he go ahead and install the old XP, on the HDD in question and let M$ worry about whether he's legal or not. After all, the first thing they'll do in the unlikely event that they find out what he's doing is threaten him. If he gets a letter, well, he says, "OK, I didn't know that ..." and goes on about his business. If he's using Vista or WIn7, M$ has placed the necessary security holes in place that allow them and all SPA members to snoop in his computer. However, since it's only the OS license that's in question, that's probably as far as things will go.

I don't know how it is in Europe, but here in the U.S, I'm pretty sure that a jury would see that Ralph's act was simply to replace a broken component in the system and reassembled it. Since attitudes are mostly against megacorporations, I doubt he'll get hurt, and, in fact, I doubt even greedy M$ would bother.

RE