Reply to post: How many duplicates?

How many duplicates?

How many duplicate installs? I'm sure there are plenty of actual installs on real hardware. But check this out...

So, I installed a WIn10 prerelease into a VM, and once RTM shipped I wanted to know if this VM was portable or if activation would screw it up (I have no intention of moving it around, but wanted to know if it'd blow up if I had to replace any hardware, especially after a year when Win7 to WIn10 upgrade would not work). Installed a prelease, later updated to RTM -- activation failed (turns out, after about a 1 day window where upgrades from prelease to RTM worked, one had to go back to Win7/8/8.1 and do an upgrade to Windows 10. Thank goodness for Virtual Machines). So, this counted as an install. Went to a Win7 VM, upgraded it to Win10 (hardware in VirtualBox was slightly different, so this counted as a new install.) Fiddled SLIGHTLY with VM hardware settings, Windows went unactivated, updated again from Win7 (counted as a new install.) Tried moving this from a 2.4ghz Core2Duo to 3.0ghz Core2Duo system to see if the VM was at all portable -- activation failed. I did a Win7->Win10 upgrade on there (counted as a new install.) I discarded this VM, re-installed the VM from the 2.4ghz, but fiddled with VirtualBox's CPUID settings (activation failed, CPUID was different from the 2.4 *and* the 3.0, so counted as a new install.) Fiddled with more VirtualBox CPUID settings (activation failed, but would have counted as ANOTHER new install.) Then, even though Win10 was already activated on the 2.4, I installed a KMS crack on the VM anyway so I wouldn't have to worry about it (I don't think this will phone home and count as any more installs if it's moved around.)

This means their methodology would count my single install of Windows 10 as 6 unique installs. How many people have fiddled with VirtualBox or (god forbid) something like VMWare VMotion where a virtual machine can *automatically* migrate to another computer?