Yves is very mistaken. There are no limits to the number of times you can activate XP over either the phone or the internet. I have tested many programs and some have caused unusual consequences resulting in XP being unusable or unstable and necessitating a reinstall. I have activated XP over the internet as many as six times in one day. With DSL I can now reinstall in just under 2hrs and that includes all my third party software that I save to disk. Consequently I have learned a way around the on line or over the phone activation. If you want to stop the need to either phone or connect to the internet then go into your windows\system32 folder and find the wpa.dbl file. Copy this to a floppy and save it. Now whenever it calls for a reactivation you simply click the "not at this time" and then go into the windows\system32 folder when you get to your desktop and copy the wpa.dbl from the floppy to this folder. Overwrite any wpa.dbl present as it will ask you if you want to. Don't bother trying to read the wpa.dbl as it is heavily encoded by microsoft when you first installed and activated XP. It contains your system configuration and hardware profiles and so on. Welcome to the eXPeriance. {:~)