This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 11:44 and is filed under Analysis & Commentary, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Can it be that there’s a way to trick Microsoft’s Windows XP Genuine Certificate of Authority install? Well maybe. Take a look at my Device Manager from my Parallels Desktop install of Windows XP SP2. Note the devices, which Windows uses to make your configuration unique, are all general notations. Meaning, every Parallels install will say the same thing. There really isn’t anything unique about the install accept the Certificate of Authority number and your MAC (Media Access Control) address in this install.
So that said, you could basically use the same Windows XP install for your entire home since chances are you won’t be using them all at the same time, thus not setting off the MS Police when it notices different MAC addresses coming from the same NAT IP. Then again, that might not even matter, too, since this is already a common experience with legit installs from businesses that buy tons of identical PCs by the truck load for their cubicals.
So did SvenOnTech find a loophole in the way Parallels presents XP to Microsoft? Will we be saving you all some cash? We can’t say for sure until we test this out on other Macs. But we can tell you this much, if this does work, then you won’t even have do multiple installs but rather use the same HDD file for Parallels. How sweet this could be!
We’ll keep you posted on this and if you’ve already tried this, please confirm or deny this report in the comments.
January 29th, 2007 at 14:45
I recently installed parallels on my macbook pro, however i alredy registered my windows xp license to bootcamp. Is there any way of parallels recognizing the alredy registered serial from bootcamp?