Until now Microsoft’s licenses have prevented that being done legally except in what IT hardware re-furbisher TechTurn described as rare circumstances, forcing the sale of second-hand boxes with no operating system.

We’ve been pushing in this direction for several years, because our customers have been asking us to re-load operating systems, said Jake Player, president at Techturn.

This is Microsoft stepping in and providing quite a bit of credibility. It does a lot for the sustainability message, and it’s going to help expand the secondary market. It’ll open up new channels to people who until now haven’t been confident about buying from this market, said TechTurn president Jake Player.

As well as providing licenses for Windows XP Home and Professional editions, the scheme will also see Microsoft support the re-loaded OSs and hardware drivers. The Redmond giant will provide recyclers with software to manage the loading of those drivers onto second hand gear.

TechTurn resells a range of second-hand corporate IT hardware, including network switches, servers and printers, directly from its web site, and through a variety of channels –including eBay — into what Player said is a fragmented market.

The recycler resells over 5,000 second-hand PCs each month to consumers, small businesses, resellers, and schools and colleges. But until now most of those PCs have had no OS loaded, because the corporations that originally owned them wiped their disk drives before letting them go, for security reasons. Without a PC Certificate of Authenticity or recovery media disk or image, a Windows re-load has been illegal.

Even if recyclers were not faced with the driver difficulties, the $170 retail price of Windows XP would make it uneconomic to re-load machines via that route, Player said.

Previously Microsoft has operated only a Community MAR program, which covered Windows re-loads for recyclers selling solely to charities, non-profit organizations and schools and colleges.

Microsoft estimates that 28m or 10% of all the PCs sold worldwide this year will be second-hand. The licenses issued by the MAR program will be in English, French and Spanish, which Microsoft claimed will allow re-furbishers to ship anywhere in the world.

The program is open to major OEMs worldwide and to other OEMs and refurbishers in North America. Microsoft said that it hopes to expand the program worldwide in future.