You have 30 days to activate, but you must fill in the Activation Key during the install and I'm not sure how that affects installing on a diff computer. You will love Win 7 and want it on both computers. What I would do is to run the Upgrade Advisor on both computers and decide then. There is no uninstall procedure that I know of, so you would need to reinstall Vista from dvd or disk image if you removed Win 7 from the laptop. You can't use the recovery partition after the win 7 install. Read this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971762

Not true. You do not need to enter the key on install, you have 30 days to do this and activate. There is also a way to extend the activation up to 90 days. Just google it. I am currently running Windows 7 Pro on my XPS 730x and did not enter my key yet as I am waiting for my dell upgrade to show up.

Thanks for the help will try that.

dcgtis is correct.  In fact, the advisors in the Windows 7 Forum recommend that you NOT enter the product key during installation, but wait until you've got a successful installation and have run Windows Update.

When you are ready to activate, just click the Start button and type "activate windows."