xp activation: moving cdrom counts against you

[Beemer Biker]

Just want to express my displeasure at haveing to call in and re-activate
windows after moving a CDRW from slave on primary ide to master on PATA of
Promise SATA/PATA card I just added. There was more that changed than the
CD over the last year, but that must have been the straw that broke the
camels back. After getting re-activated (and being treated like a product
key thief) I googled around and got xpinfo.exe

I ran it: All items were checked as OK'ed by gatesware.
Then I moved the CDRW that caused the original problem to another IDE
position. The checkbox for CDROM got unchecked. That is a count against me
that, when accumulated to some magic number, forces re-activation. I then
moved the CDRW back and the checkbox got rechecked as Mr Gates seems to have
OK'ed the original positon.


No, I have no interest in using LINUX, thanks anyway.


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[Arno Wagner]

Just want to express my displeasure at haveing to call in and
re-activate windows after moving a CDRW from slave on primary ide to
master on PATA of Promise SATA/PATA card I just added. There was
more that changed than the CD over the last year, but that must have
been the straw that broke the camels back. After getting
re-activated (and being treated like a product key thief) I googled
around and got xpinfo.exe

I ran it: All items were checked as OK'ed by gatesware. Then I
moved the CDRW that caused the original problem to another IDE
position. The checkbox for CDROM got unchecked. That is a count
against me that, when accumulated to some magic number, forces
re-activation. I then moved the CDRW back and the checkbox got
rechecked as Mr Gates seems to have OK'ed the original positon.

No, I have no interest in using LINUX, thanks anyway.

Then maybe you should push for MS finally respecting you as a
customer, not as one of the unwashed masses that should pay
for the privilege of using their stuff.

Not that I am surprised that XP is too stupid to detect that
a drive was only moved.

Arno

 

[Beemer Biker]

SNIP


Then maybe you should push for MS finally respecting you as a
customer, not as one of the unwashed masses that should pay
for the privilege of using their stuff.

Not that I am surprised that XP is too stupid to detect that
a drive was only moved.

Arno

Thanks, that was good. I just went over to
and used your response in
reply to one of their MVP's who told me I paid too little for their product.


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Beemer Biker (e-mail address removed)
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[Arno Wagner]

Thanks, that was good. I just went over to
and used your
response in reply to one of their MVP's who told me I paid too
little for their product.

You might like this here also:

http://tinyurl.com/bxsqu

Seems their greed knows little limits. What keeps surprising me
is that they can get away with this mistreatment of the customer.
If that is not a strong sign of an actively abused monopoly,
I don't know what is.

Arno

 

[J. Clarke]

You might like this here also:

http://tinyurl.com/bxsqu

Seems their greed knows little limits. What keeps surprising me
is that they can get away with this mistreatment of the customer.
If that is not a strong sign of an actively abused monopoly,
I don't know what is.

Who, specifically do you perceive to be the "abused customers" here?
There's nothing new there except the definition of "different" which was
rather nebulous before and which if the license is to be enforceable at all
had to be nailed down eventually.

 

[Beemer Biker]

Who, specifically do you perceive to be the "abused customers" here?
There's nothing new there except the definition of "different" which was
rather nebulous before and which if the license is to be enforceable at all
had to be nailed down eventually.

Hmm. Have you been in the vicinity of Redmond lately? Did a day or two go
missing that you can't account for?


--
=======================================================================
Beemer Biker (e-mail address removed)
http://TipsForTheComputingImpaired.com
http://ResearchRiders.org Ask about my 99'R1100RT
=======================================================================

 

[Arno Wagner]

Arno Wagner wrote:

Who, specifically do you perceive to be the "abused customers" here?
There's nothing new there except the definition of "different" which
was rather nebulous before and which if the license is to be
enforceable at all had to be nailed down eventually.

MS is brazenly wasting their customers time with these measures.
Nobody complains or thinks they can do anything about it. I call
that customer abuse.

Arno

 

[J. Clarke]

MS is brazenly wasting their customers time with these measures.
Nobody complains or thinks they can do anything about it. I call
that customer abuse.

Again, which specific customers do you perceive as being affected by their
taking the step of defining the word "different" for contractual purposes,
and how much of their time is being wasted that was not wasted prior to
that particular action?

Personally I've wasted more time waiting for Linux kernels to compile than I
ever have activating Microsoft products.

 

[Curious George]

MS is brazenly wasting their customers time with these measures.
Nobody complains or thinks they can do anything about it. I call
that customer abuse.

Arno

And undoubtedly they'll be more to come with Vista and the
"trustworthy computing" mumbo jumbo.

A shame that the problem is only for the small guys & individuals who
try to play by the rules.

While all this was allegedly intended to cut down on "casual piracy"
even "casual pirates" can easily get a hold of a key generator and a
volume licensed edition. So its big organizations and pirates that
have the "don't break my balls" licensing scheme & everyone else is
treated like a criminal. Brilliant!

 

[Curious George]

Again, which specific customers do you perceive as being affected by their
taking the step of defining the word "different" for contractual purposes,

Can't speak for him but I perceive some individual power users & most
enthusiasts as highly affected. In addition to very small businesses
and a small percentage of average users who require/desire certain
upgrades.

and how much of their time is being wasted that was not wasted prior to
that particular action?

Clearly you're ****ing with him. Why should ANY time be wasted? The
point is there is no respect for these individuals' time. IMHO most
consumers would agree that support calls are for fixing problems not
placating a company that already has your money.

Imagine you had to call your car manufacturer to have it remotely
started every time you change gas stations too many times, or you
replace the windshield wipers AND rotate the tires? I know I'd be
annoyed regardless of how long or short the call was.

The problem is it uses what is widely recognized as a highly flawed
system to determine whether or not you are trying to illegally copy a
license to a different machine. When this flawed system screws up and
trips a false alarm their product unfairly & incorrectly hijacks your
ability to freely use not only their legally purchased & used OS
product but also other legally owned products from other companies -
until you get someone to turn off their "false alarm". So in practice
their usage model & license security system supersedes any legal
agreement you may have with Dell or HP or Sybase, or Adobe or whoever.
It doesn't even do a good job of enforcing the spirit of the MS
license.

If it wasn't a PITA volume licensing wouldn't exist. MS knows they
can't afford to **** with their large corporate customers - who simply
otherwise couldn't justify purchasing products that involved the
wasted expense of dealing with retail-type activation schemes.

The best spin on the situation is this activation scheme was
essentially an initial, flawed, experiment as they incrementally try
to secure more control over their products & piracy in future
versions. It is a call for different, improved technology to support
protection of software companies profits while disrupting consumers
less. At least I'd buy something like that - but it's laughable to
pretend no one really did, or is entitled to, get their feathers
ruffled by this highly flawed system.

Personally I've wasted more time waiting for Linux kernels to compile than I
ever have activating Microsoft products.

But you knew on the onset that you were either having
fun/experimenting (with disposable time) or trying to do something
very specific that can't easily be done on a MS esp NT platform.

 

[RSS]

For what it's worth, a similar thing just happened to me with Microsoft
Office. I had done some swapping of positions and cables for drives,
all the while, having mirrored the original drive to whatever
substitutes I used in its place. I've done this before with no
consequence, and this time, I couldn't run Office without giving it the
CD. Annoying but not devastating. Still much rather be dealing with
this kind of thing, than using a Mac [please ignore that last
statement, and resist the urge to start a flame war!]