With right certificate and key you mean a Vista certificate and key? So if I have a 2.1 slic in bios and a Vista OEM-certificate and Vista OEM-key, it should work? Reason I ask: My parrents have a Acer laptop with slic 2.0 and Vista. It came with a win7-upgrade coupon. I wonder if I flash the bios to slic 2.1, if the Vista that comes with it will still be able to activate (in case my parrents dont like win7 and I have to reinstall Vista).
Nope, for Acer systems you need to install the new 2009 OEM Certificate (aka 2.1 Certificate) on Vista systems when using the 2.1 SLIC bios
Well, With my ragards, 2.1 works in very much the similar way of OEM Activation (OA) 2.0. The only changes is Windows Marker version is now version 2.1 instead of 2.0. Even the digital certificate, which has file extension of .xrm-ms, signed by Microsoft with OEM’s SLIC public key with Microsoft’s private key together with OEMID of SLIC table, is unchanged.
The certificate changes even if there is a minor change in the date of issue (eg.Toshiba) or the public key is changed by the OEM (eg. Acer, Asus). Dell certificate remains the same since it has used the same public key for both versions.