It's great that Windows 7, in various guises, is available. Naturally, though, one wants to test one's everyday applications on the new OS as well. So what are we supposed to do about the activation requirements each time these are re-installed? I had to activate MS Office 2007 on Windows 7 Beta (luckily I have Action Pack licenses) and now that RC is out, I have to re-install Office 2007 and activate again, thus using a thirdlicense. I'm not so fortunate with some of my other critical software, so am having difficulty setting up a fully functional Windows 7 testing environment. What are we supposed to do about this activation issue?

Beevreeter - Given the nature of the Beta/RC cycle - I'm going to go out on a limb and think that Microsoft would be fairly forgiving with you installing and testing their own software pacakages on Windows 7. After all, they DO want things to be tested. If you had an older version of Windows on the machine previously - say, XP or Vista -and you upgraded the OS with a clean install to Win 7 RC, and then reinstalled the SAME software on the same machine, it would seem to me that it should merely be a reactivation of the same license - after all, the hardware hasn't changed - just the OS. As far as other vendors are concerned, I can't speak for them all, but it would make sense that they would likely have a policy for handling things like OS reinstalls and OS upgrades. What's the policy if the hard drive crashes and dies andyou need to replace it? Seems kind of obvious that eventually hardware will fail and will need to be repaired or replaced - and there should be some contingency to account for such things.

I have installed my Office 2007 on my Win7 RC and reactivated it with no problems (as well as a couple other programs). Took to it right away and no calling into MS. So, my answer is, there should be no problems reactivating such programs.wolfie