Office XP Nrees Constant Re-activation. Please help.

Office XP Needs Constant Re-activation. Please help.

Hi,

I'm running PD 4.0 flawlessly, using Boot Camp partition. I have to say, I'm impressed with Coherence. Opening an Windows XP Word doc in Finder and then automatically loading PD and VM and Word. When you print wirelessly from Windows Word and it calls up the OS X Printer, that's even more amazing. Wow.

However, after I installed Office XP in Boot camp, I needed to activate it PD 4.0. The activation in VM went well, but when I rebooted into Boot Camp, it asked to Re-activate Office XP again. That went well, too, but when I went back into PD 4.0 VM, I had to activate Office XP yet again.

So, I figure, as long as I don't load Office XP in Boot Camp, I can continue to use PD VM Office XP with no problem. However, is there a way around this. It would be nice to use Office XP in both environments, like Win XP, without having to constantly re-activate.

Thanks.

 

It's just a guess, but I would have thought that Office is needing re-activation because of a change in MAC address of your network adapter. Boot Camp will be using the real network card in your Mac, and you may have Parallels set to use a virtual network adapter (with it's own generated/fake MAC address).

In this mode, having the virtual network adapter use the same MAC address, I would have thought, would cause network problems, so the solution might be: (I suggest you do a full backup unless you are comfortable with the following procedure)

1) Note down the MAC address of your real network card (System Preferences -> Network -> Advanced Button -> Ethernet tab.) It's the set of six 2 digit hex numbers with colons between then (like 00:19:ae:1b:6e:51)

2) Configure your virtual machine, select Network Adapter 1 from the Hardware section. Note down the setting then change the MAC address to the noted down number from 1) above BUT uncheck the connected box (I might also suggest selecting Host-Only Networking too).

3) Then add a new network adapter (click the + below the hardware list and select Network Adapter). Now set this adapter up to how the other one was set (before you changed the MAC address). The MAC address of the new network adapter is not so important unless you know it is being used for static DHCP allocation or something, but it must not be the same as your real network card.

You should now be good to go.