Installing XP to a bare HD

Hi All,

The children of a friend of mine have been given an old computer with Windows 95 on, and I thought that for Christmas I could pep it up a bit for them as I have some PC100 memory, a Geforce 4 graphics card, and a 40GB HD just lying around doing nothing. It already has a Pentium 1600 mH which will do.
I have bought an OEM XP Pro complete with licence, and I plan to install the XP Pro onto the HD before they arrive with the old computer, so that I can just install the extra memory, the graphics card, and the HD, and in a few minutes they will be up and running.
I would just like some confirmation that the XP Pro will not establish its hardware 'fingerprint' for the activation process until it actually is activated on their machine. I would not want it locked to the computer on which it was installed to the HD.
Any advice will be gratefully accepted.

Roger

 

I think you would be better off to wait until you get the HD into the machine that it is going to be used in.

BillyBob

 

Roger:

Your heart is in the right spot, the concept is solid and the methodology is almost there - it just needs a little "tweaking ". While BillyBob offers solid advice for a problem free experience, Christer is "on the money" but a bit too skeptical. You can do an XP installation in your machine and then pull the drive. Don't activate it (which also means you can't do any updates (73 right now)). Then, when you put it in your friends machine, boot to the same XP OEM CD and do a repair installation. You can install other software on the drive while its in your machine but if you put AV software on there, I'd uninstall it before putting the drive in your friends machine and doing the repair install. The total time involved will be more than if you just started from scratch on your friend's machine but its pretty much a problem free procedure.