Vista and Office

irlrobins

I'm planning on installing vista in the next week or so. I hope to set up a dual boot with it and XP on the one PC.

Is it ok for me to install office 2003 on both OS's? Or will that cause problems both from a software point of view or licencing?

Cheers
R

8T8

I think it largely depends on what version you have in the first place as there are versions of Office 2003 that permit multiple installs, ones without product activation and ones with a EULA intended for one computer only.

However in practice there may be nothing stopping you, it is the same computer you are installing it on after all should they ask on product activation

seamus

Well now, that is an interesting one. Particularly when you take shared partitions into account.

For example, let's say you have logical disks on your machine -
C: - Where XP is installed
- Where Vista is installed
E: - For applications and data

You could install Office 2003 in XP, specifying e:\office as the directory. Once that's complete, you could then boot into Vista and install office to the same directory.

So technically you have only one copy the of the install. But then equally technically it's installed twice.

I can't see any major furore or problems with this from a licencing POV. It will be impossible to run the software concurrently using the one licence, so MS are unlikely to kick up a fuss.

A place I used to work for used virtual servers quite heavily. One particular server was quite important, so we had one live virtual server, and one "switched off" copy that we could boot if the live image ever died.

My boss at the time actually spoke with Microsoft directly to ask if they had to pay for another licence for the switched off version, seeing as there would only be one instance of that particular server live at any one time. Microsoft officially did the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil thing so they didn't pay for another licence.

irlrobins

Coola. It's a professional version of 2003 so I think I can do multiple installs provided I'm the sole user (which would be the case).