On Sun, 06 Jan 2013 12:28:29 -0500, Ron Rosenfeld wrote:

On Sun, 06 Jan 2013 08:13:02 -0800, Chairman Meow wrote:

They have not implemented these things for a while. There must be some
way for a John Doe OEM Machne maker who buys Joe Bloe MOBO maker's cheap
run MOBO series in M quantities to go in and set these parameters.

I'd bet the main drawback is that each BIOS chip would have to be
individually burned with a unique code block, as opposed to mass burning
a bank of BIOS chips all at one time with the same code. But a modern
flash chip could do both. Burn the base code, and update the S/N later.
but that STILL requires individual chip attention and handling, as well
as the tracking aspect imposed on the maker.

That explains a lot. Even the UUID can, according to some stuff I've read, change if the MB loses all power (including the battery backup).

I wonder how MS ties an installation to a particular motherboard? Do they use the machine GUID in the registry? Or something else?


They use the HD UUID and whatever other HW UUIDs they can find and even
S/Ns that get extracted and published via vendor drivers in operation.

I have had to call them in the past after a HW change and rectify my
re-activation.

So, some "found and stored" s/N or ID figure(s) in the registry get
tested, and if they change, the activation gets negated. That way, they
do not have to do any specific phone-home type snooping. The machine has
the engine built in, and then they service the customer with the raised
flag when they call... if they call. Much less labor for them that way.