Tag: WINDOWSGENUINEADVANTAGE

Product activation is something that's been bugging computers users for years now, and whilst the inconvenience to users has been somewhat minor, it appears that the Doomsday-esque scenario of activations being impossible due to a technical fault seems to have struck. Of all the companies that it could have hit, BoingBoing is reporting that it has hit a rather large and dominant player in the ...

Venerable Windows expert Ed Bott has been carefully documenting his misadventures with Windows Genuine Advantage for a few months now. As evidence mounted that the WGA system was not as bulletproof as Microsoft would like to have us believe, Ed decided to get statistical on their ass, so to speak. After scouring Microsoft's own help forums looking for people reporting problems with WGA, Ed found ...

I was considering prefacing this post with 'recipe for disaster', but I didn't want the food and cooking news aggregators to pick it up by mistake. Microsoft Watch is reporting that the Redmond giant is planning to use their Automatic Updates service to push IE 7 out to Windows users sooner or later in Q4 once the product is ready to ship. Fortunately for the sysadmins in the crowd, Microsoft will ...

With all the digital rights management floating about in the ether these days, and fiascos like Microsoft's WGA, I found myself standing beside myself, saying "Self, how much DRM (Digital Rights Management) is enough?" Self turned to me and said, "I don't know, but whatever it is, it is enough." While I couldn't tell if this was more poignant or confusing, I think my self is right. Good grief! Why ...

So let's just say, hypothetically, that your copy of Windows XP isn't "genuine." If you're tired of seeing the warning that alerts you to this fact, there's now a workaround to disable the WGA notifications. Does it work? Honestly I don't know, because every version of Windows I touch appears to be the real thing. And of course, I'm not here to advocate piracy. But the incessant ...

There's no beer involved, but according to Steve Dodson's blog Microsoft's AntiSpyware will NOT be a commercial application. That is, it will remain free for anyone running a genuine XP install. As long as you do the "Windows Genuine Advantage" thing, no problem. Apparently someone had posted up a purported comment from an MS employee stating AntiSpyware was no longer going to be free. ...