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MS Office Mac 2004 Academic - installs left?

A

acrafton

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 18, 2006
268
3
Hey. I have a version of MS Office 2004 Student & Teacher edition that was used by my wife a while ago but is no longer really used. She has switched to IWork and seems happy so I want to sell it.

I went out to ebay to see what they are selling for and found several listings that listed the number installs 'left'. It comes with 3 but is that a license agreement or a technical restriction? Does it check?

The reason I am asking is because I am done with it and it is off my computer and I have no need for it but don't want to sell it to someone who can't install it x times. . .can you check with MSFT to see what is left and/or transfer the license?

Thanks
Adam
 
It's only a legal restriction. The Office DVD comes with three different license codes, but technically there's nothing to stop you reusing any of the codes. But MS would maybe notice if you installed it on, say, 10 different Macs.

I've install Office for the PC on maybe four or five different PCs using the same license code. But either I uninstalled prior installations or the PC died, so I never ran two installs simultaneously.

By the way, I believe the academic version of Office is not transferable. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember reading that somewhere.
 
Office does not "phone home" to Microsoft. It pokes around on your local network to ensure that you're not using the same serial number on two or more computers, but if you sell it to somebody else then you won't have any issues.

If people are saying "2 licences left" then they're probably keeping one of the codes for themselves, which is against the terms of the licence (they're sold as a 3-pack, not three individual licences).
 
Nermal said:
Office does not "phone home" to Microsoft. ...
Click to expand...
Are you sure? Office v.X did not require activation; only a serial number. With Office 2004, Microsoft requires activation. On the Windows side, the user must telephone Microsoft for an activation code if he does not have an Internet connection. IIRC, this is also the case with Office 2004.
 
The way it's worked with me and both Windows XP Home and Office XP was it would call up MS and ask them how many computers it's been installed on. After so many installs (even on the same computer, so I guess it's how many activations) it will tell me it has exceeded its limit and I have to call.

Recently, when my hard drive was giving me problems, I had to install Windows onto another hard drive. I asked them how all this works, and when you call, they really don't have a record of how many times you've called, they just know you're calling this time. I've never had a problem when calling, and I've had to do it many times, since I bought this copy of Windows XP back in 2001, and have upgraded computers quite a bit (I build my own).
 
Nermal said:
I have never needed to activate my copy of Office 2004.
Click to expand...
It's automatic if you are on the 'net.

davidg4781 said:
... they just know you're calling this time. I've never had a problem when calling, and I've had to do it many times, since I bought this copy of Windows XP back in 2001, and have upgraded computers quite a bit (I build my own).
Click to expand...
I think we are talking about two different issues. Like you, lots of other Windows users phone-in for help restoring their activations after adding a graphics card or some other relatively routine system upgrade. Having the number of activations in a database is important information, but it cannot distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate requests. The number of legitimate requests is huge. It is impractical to try to weed-out the illegitimate requests, except possibly in obvious and egregious cases.
 
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