Here's what we did. I had an old computer in the attic. I told my buddy that it needed just a couple of parts and Windows and it would work great for him. We ordered a copy of Windows XP and today went down to get him a monitor and stuff. When we got home I put it all together and loaded my own copy of XP on it to see if it would work. It runs great and he took it home to get it set up. I told him it would work fine but we would have to wipe it clean again when his copy of XP got here. But would we?

I'm thinking that we could activate the loaded Windows with his license key over the phone without having to dump all the stuff on the hard drive again. The last time I did this over the phone, they simply asked for my key and then gave me a code to type into the activation form and the computer ran fine. I hope that's the case. It would simplify things.