Question about Vista phone activation???

This past weekend I reformatted by hard drive and reinstalled Vista Ultimate. When I tried activating via the internet I got the message saying that my product key was already in use.

So I called the activation hotline for my country.

I was presented with 8 groups of numbers where each group had 6 digits that I repeated for an automated voice on the phone. The voice then gave me another 8 groups of numbers where each group had 6 digits and I entered these numbers. After doing this I successfully activated Vista.

My question is this. If someone else had my product key would they be able to just activate Vista on their own machine via this phone activation method. For me, I don't see how any of these numbers are tying back into my own system which is what I believe my product key is tied to.

Because I'm sure if I had to reinstall again I would get a different bunch of numbers presented to me.

Anyone know how everything is linked together?

Thanks for the help.

Top : Bottom

Thanks for the info. The last time I installed Vista was about 6 months ago. But prior to that I think I must've installed Vista about 10 times or more. But this time I think I'm going to keep my system the way it is. Prior, I was just experimenting with partitions and stuff like that. Other times I had to re-install cause my power went off during a Vista update stage and I was never able to get back into my system properly.