Windows XP Home
Windows Xp Home OEM

After a quick Google I realised if I got the OEM version I could save a few bob whilst loosing some rights to support. I thought that was a fair trade.

A year into running XP with this new key, I had to reinstall XP (again) for maybe the 5th time. Sometimes a reinstall fixes everything! I went to activate XP only to be told that this copy had been activated too many times!

It turns out you have to buy the none-OEM version to activate more than 5 times.

I suppose this makes sense; after all people like Dell create an image of the XP install for you to restore which is already activated.

I suppose the advice is buy OEM to save a few quid if you are confident that you can fix most problems without support howver, crucially, ensure that you take an image of the install once done, with something like Norton Ghost (or whatever its called now- RollBack?), Acronis True Image or similar tool.

I tried to ditch MS as my main operating system however it fell down when trying to do some gaming on Linux. But for general duties, I am sure Linux will be ok. Must admit a Mac will be even nicer

It would be churlish and predicatble, of me (so I’ll do it), to lift one of Mr Allchin’s most famous quotes (from an email to el. Gates and Balmer, leaked in the Comes v. Microsoft case of last year, and drop it into this context…

Quoth Allchin:
“I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems our customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn’t translate into great products.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft… “

(It’s interesting to watch your metamorphosis into “Voice of Reason Man”)!

After all, you’ve paid more money than I would for (say) two *really nice* new outdoor rugs, for my horse, and yet all you have, to show for it, is a defunct and unusable computer. (If you ever feel like throwing money down the toilet, “Dan’s Outdoor Rugs for His Horse Fund” is always happy to act as an alternative outlet for your generous flushings ) ).

But I ask in all serious: have you tried contacting them? I’m not for a moment suggesting that those Dixons-dropout-drongos, they employ at Microsoft Reading’s UK support branch, would be able to help, but at least you’d be able to add your name to the list of people whose perfectly legal copies of Windows have been borked, by WGA.

I recall talking to someone from Microsoft, back in the Wrox days, who admitted that, by their own figures WGA – or rather the prototype WGA system, as it was, then, since this was 2001/2002, we’re talking about, here, and WGA was still a pipedream of someone in COSD (Who? Soma?) – anyway, WGA was throwing up something like a 5.0% rate of false-positives, against legitimate copies of Windows – especially OEM copies (latest MIcrosoft figures show that this has been tightened to about a 0.5% failure rate in the live version of WGA.

If you ever doubted you were a statistic, Bruce, there’s your statistical evidence, to show that you are.

Anyway, I remembe this guy saying to me that his team knew that WGA was potentially ‘borked’ (his word) – especially for some key hardware and software combinations. However, he also said that without enough feedback from enough customers to show that it was a ‘genuine’TM problem, WGA would be pushed through, as it was, by a management that simply “wasn’t receptive to bad news” (again, to use his expression).

Since go-live, for WGA, it’s harder to quantify how big the problem really is, largely because of the customer’s own unwillingness to actually report problems (again, to quote our beleaguered friend from Microsoft: “People just think we do this stuff, simply to be mean to them.”)

Even a 0.5% false-positive rate in WGA against all Windows users, worldwide, is something like half a million people. If they were willing to ship WGA with that sort of failure rate, then perhaps they need a wake up call from those very Microsoft developers who were trying, even back then, to say that it was a bad idea (at least, as it was being implemented) – especially if we could arm those developers with some figures that showed that the real figure is potentially much higher than 0.5%?

I mean, Bruce: you’ve had two failures in a row… You’re almost in danger of not being a statistic, any more, and ventuing into the realms of the ‘statistically significant’. Could yours be one of those ‘special’ hardware/software combinations that caused unusual levels of grief, way back when I spoke to my friend from Redmond about this?

In summary, by all means, put Ubuntu onto your otherwise useless PC and press it back into work as a test webserver, or something: by all means buy a Mac… But until those people trying to genuinely change Microsoft from the inside are given enough amunition to show management that something is seriously wrong, in Microsoft land, then those people are faced with the stark choice of either: a) Whining in corners with ‘Minimsft’ and co. b) ‘doing a Scobel’ and simply jumping ship, one quie weekend, instead, or c) srewing over their colleagues in order to rise to the top of the ‘yes man’ pile, in endorsing their boss’s ever more hairbrained schemes to treat those few people who DO still buy Microsoft products, with a willing heart, as potential pirates.