As reported previously in WinInfo Daily UPDATE, Microsoft will offer a break to consumers who want to buy more than one copy of Windows XP through a new Additional Family License (AFL) program that will shave up to $30 off the usual price. When I spoke to the company about this development last month, AFL details were pretty slim; Microsoft had decided to go ahead with the plan just a few days earlier. But now, a month later, AFL is starting to come together.
Customers who purchase XP Home or XP Professional Editions, Upgrade or Full versions, will be eligible to purchase AFL for $10 to $30 less than the full price, Microsoft says, depending on the version purchased. These licenses will be available in retail locations and, eventually, through download from Microsoft's Web sites and won't include the typical CD-ROM customers get with a retail package. Instead, the licenses will simply include an additional product key so that users can legally install XP on another PC.
AFL is necessary because of a new security feature in XP called Windows Product Activation (WPA), which is designed to prevent casual copying. WPA will lock a copy of XP to one PC, preventing it from being easily installed on a second computer.
