I'm planning to have two separate installations of Windows XP on my new computer. The first is my "normal" copy of Windows for my own use. The second is a "sandbox" copy for the kids to use. The idea is that I'm generally a bit paranoid about installing wierd programs, toolbars, browser add-ons on my machine. Even if they are not malicious or adware, I like to avoid clutter and lint on the machine, things that might slow it down.
But lots of kids web-sites have games that require some unusual 3-d plug-in, or the like. Having a separate Windows install lets me install these types of things without too much worry. I can always just re-install their copy without having to rebuild the whole machine.
This is two complete installations in separate hard drive partitions, but on the same computer so only one can be booted at once.
Anyway, my question is this: I am planning to get NIS 2010. Will this setup require 2 licenses, one per Windows instance? Or, since it is in fact the same PC and only one instance can run at once, is 1 license enough? There is a single PC OEM version of NIS available at the local store which is cheaper than the 3 PC version.
I figure that when I install NIS on the 2nd instance, the licensing software/installer should think it is just being reinstalled on the same machine (just like after a hard drive crash) since all the hardware, MAC addresses, or whatever they use, would profile the same. The only difference is the disks and partiritions. The sandbox instance would only see it's own partition; my copy would see both (the plan is to hide the real partition when running the sandbox using linux grub... linux will also be on the machine).
And even if the installer thinks it is the same instance, am I in accordance with the license agreement by doing this with a single license?