Leosghost - 11:33 pm on Oct 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

Most of the people who have problems with their legit XP suddenly being declared invalid is because MS said exactly the same about Xp ..30 days cut off point without WGA and activation code ..and so keygens were made that generated random codes ( based on hash values of youir installed componants multiplied by your grannies birthday etc ) to be fed to doze customer activation either automatically or to real reps ..

then one day ..you need to re-activate your suddenly trashed doze ...XP was supposed to be too stable and well protected ever to need a reformat ;-))..remember the hype ..

thats the day that Redmond say no ..because someone has a keygen generated XP running ..which has the same base ID that yours does ..and they already activated theirs ..via Redmond .( not the only way to do so ..but the most comon used by those who just "torrented" themselves down an iso ..but dont know how to do anything else )..and Redmond has decided on a first come first served basis that theirs is the legit version ..the lucky people get to speak to a rep from MS who know just how dumb that is as way to verify authenticity and they give you another working active code ..MS theory says that only one answer can come out of the hash made from your install ID and your machine and so it ought to be failsafe ..

that "security" would only work if corporations and constructors couldn't get "clone your HD" deals from MS and if certain other things couldnt be worked around ..

now if they'd used the same level of security that they put into Xbox from the very first one ..it would have been a whole different ball game ..but Xbox was wrapped much tighter be just a game player to stop people getting their hands on a pentium III with a near 10 gig HD and usefull RAM ( for it's day at $150.oo it was a third the price for those specs that equivalent pc was ) and running linux on it as it didn't have doze of any normal flavour installed ..that was the real nightmare to be avoided ..( whatever the PR dept said otherwise ) ..so that protection was wrapped into the bus ..

I know at least 8 ways to open XP and get it working without the phone call ( there must be more ..but I got bored and it was just academic exercise to try them out ..some of what you see as "working" on the tubes ..doesn't and is laughable ) ..mine are legal because ..amonst other things ..I may get controlled at any time .. and the OS is cheap ..although it costs me much more here than it does in the states and the translated help files are not done well ..;)

but it certainly wasn't fear of not being able to "update" that made me stay legit with XP..( rather than burn an iso or clone an HD and "adjust" the reg .. ) ..

already the best way to not have problems with doze is in this order ..

run a regmon ..
dont click OK ( without really knowing what you are saying yes to ) ..anyone can make that lil grey box ..
and disable auto update from doze..

you can always get the updates from the sites that do standalones of whatever it was ..and you wont be Redmonds beta tester of their latest panic driven hotfix ..and are then less likely to hose your OS ..

vista has already been distributed "working" in the alternative channels of the tubes ..no - one is much impressed ..and the exploits have been and are being discovered as we type and read ..

the greatest barrier to the unauthorised distro of vista will be the machine specs required to make it do anything other than crawl ..unlike XP which whilst it does prefer 1 gig of ram and a P4 or equivalent will run on a laptop with a celeron 400 and 64 megs of ram ..( just dont ask it to dance and make coffee on those specs ;-) ..nor run office ..( although I have a toshiba that is those specs and has office in there ..I dont use office tho ) ..but it can email and even run zbrush and some other awkward stuff ..and old toshibas are solid ..

but MS's vista protection is already obselete ..and considering that they let the OS out in test so widely ..they knew that anyway ..adding in a layer of slightly better protection wont stop anyone ..and MS probably dont intend to do so ..

they and their partners in software such as Adobe etc would rather you ran cracked doze than free linux ..

edited ..some spelling ..missed some more ;-))

[edited by: Leosghost at 11:38 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2006]