What are you guys doing to get your legit XP OS working under VMware/Parallels or some other virtual layer on top of OSX86, while also retaining the ability to dual boot to a pure windows XP? I had previously installed XP Pro on my machine and activated it. Now I have kalyway 10.5.2 working on my machine (And I'm damn impressed by the way), and I want to try to setup VMware fusion or something to run Windows Apps from within OSX, but the activation failed, saying I had already activated it the maximum number of times. I'm not sure if that was because I installed XP and activated it a few times on my machine earlier, or because simply the virtual machine has different virtual hardware than what they are expecting to see from my real hardware...

I read a lot of people having trouble with this on real macs. various solutions are out there, including begging MS for two activation keys, which I can't do since my XP license is OEM'd to a PC, not a Mac...so I can't really give them the story that I am trying to do this with bootcamp and Parallels at the same time. I could say that I want to boot to XP or to linux with vmware and see if they are nice. but I am wondering if there is any other solution?

I guess VMware Fusion has a tricky way to import activation stuff from the bootcamp XP installation, but again that doesn't help us OSX86 users, since we don't have bootcamp.

Is anyone else trying to use VMWare Fusion on top of OSX86 and if so, what are you doing about XP activation?

Why not just do like most people do (even if they legitimately own it) and use a pirate of the corp edition. Life is too short to bother with Microsoft's bullsh*t.

I own 4 legitimate licenses of XP, for all my PC's, sort of a shame to do that, but then on the other hand, I see your point. What happens with Genuine windows validation with those corp editions?

there is none
but i prefer to use xp student editions it gives me more peace of mind that i wont get caught

I've never heard of Xp student edition. What is that and why do you have more peace of mind?

I see the Student edition basically does not require authentication. It avoids WPA? Amazing. So seems like the only drawback is that if you use one of a set of known serial numbers to install it, then eventually MS may determine you are one of the people using that serial number and either block your updates or give you a call. heh. Seems like the cleaner approach than using the corp edition, where you have to worry about the same thing and WPA auth is still required. I will give the student edition a try inside VMware+Kalyway and see what happens.

I'm in IT; I just borrowed the VLK key from work. It's otherwise legit and not on any MS blacklists, so all the WGA stuff works.

You have to call Microsoft phone support.. There is that phone number when u are trying to activate it. Just say what is your situation and he/she gives a new code! Simple.. =)