A Little Bit of Pirate in All of Us

Search

// you’re reading...

Off the Topic

A Little Bit of Pirate in All of Us

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 13, 2007 ⋅

Tags: early adopter, piracy, vista, windows activation

It’s been roughly six months since the release of Windows Vista to the masses. Unable to shake the early-adopter syndrome (EAS) which I’m sure many can relate to, I obtained my OEM copy of Vista Home Premium and jumped into the ooh pretty experience. Fast forward to just the other day when I went to perform the Windows Update ritual. Windows Update is much improved with Vista, generally having hardware drivers for most devices, as well as updates for installed drivers. Mr Update happily informed me of driver updates for my Nforce4 SATA controller and I was clearly willing to oblige with this update (EAS again). Download. Install. Reboot.

Now, before I continue on, remember the big stink made over Windows Activation, the licensing changes to Vista, and how Windows Genuine Advantage cut down on piracy? It seems I did a rather large paying consumer no-no by downloading and installing a driver update from Windows Update. Upon my reboot from above, Vista re-detected both my harddrives and forced a second restart. To my amazement, after login I saw the pretty gold key icon down in my taskbar. Yes, Vista had become deactivated and proclaimed it necessary to reactivate within 3 days. You see, my hardware hash magically changed and triggered all the bells and whistles in the Redmond palace.

Online reactivation fails of course, as my key is already in use. By me! The nerve! Your only recourse is to phone the automated help desk, key in a 54 character code into the phone, to which the automated response tells you the code is not valid and you must speak with a human. After explaining the situation to said human and correctly navigating the 20 questions on piracy, you finally obtain the golden reactivation string! The process from start to finish took roughly 45 minutes.

You weren’t busy were you?

If you want to be notified the next time I write something please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!