Vista vs. Ultrabay-yet another reason to avoid Vista!

[mgo]

Gee, this was fun....Ultra Bay with the 2nd hard drive works dandy right off the starting line with XP, on my T60 and my T43p. But Vista? Get ready to make that "fun call" to India to re-activate Vista when you plug in a 2nd drive using Ultra Bay.

I guess Vista detects the 2nd drive as a "major hardware change" and flags it. Seems to work now after the phone call and entering the new string of numbers.

I can power down and plug in the CD or the drive adapter and there is no demand for activation now, now that I have re-activated. But why? This is substandard performance from the Vista operating system!!

Thanks, Microsoft, for taking my hundreds of dollars and then treating me like a suspect, rather than like a valued customer!

[tinue]

...I guess Vista detects the 2nd drive as a "major hardware change" and flags it.

It does, but so does XP, to the best of my knowledge. However, neither XP not Vista require you to re-activate after just one change: They sum up the changes and after you've reached a threshold they require you to re-activate.
So I would guess that you have piled up more changes under Vista already, and that's why you had to reactivate.
I had to reactivate once in the last year, after replacing the CD-R in the Ultrabase with a DVD burner, replacing the harddisk with a bigger one and adding 1GB of memory.

Best Regards, Martin

P.S. I for one am very happy with Vista on my X60s, and I get more and more irritated with XP on the office laptop. It's not the one single killer feature that does it, but the many small enhancements that I got used to over time.

[SHoTTa35]

well i'd say that's weird, i have 2 HDs in my system now and after installing Vista with the optical drive i plugged in the other drive and it didn't ask the reactivate.

You shouldn't need to call tho till 10 times, you can activaate online that many times.

[mgo]

...I guess Vista detects the 2nd drive as a "major hardware change" and flags it.

It does, but so does XP, to the best of my knowledge. However, neither XP not Vista require you to re-activate after just one change:.

Gee I guess I have agree with posters here about how many changes are allowed before Vista flags the user for re-activation. I just plugged my Ultra Bay into my R52 with Vista on board and there was -no- activation demand this time. So I guess I am under the limit on that particular machine.

All of your replies really did help me understand the process a bit better now.

(and yes, even the lowly R52 runs Vista ok with 2 gig of ram and using "Classic" mode)