Probably would have been cheaper to just buy another used laptop, if it’s that old.
Here’s a couple. Microsoft admits to a 1-2% error rate, that is millions of false accusations, apparently that’s acceptable to Microsoft. Other exports report that 20-25% of the WGA warnings are false.
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/01/8690.ars
http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/Facts.aspx?displaylang=en
Of course, WGA is not immune to false positives (or negatives, depending how you look at it.)
I have about zero trust in online bitching about these types of things. In 3 years of running my own computer shop I have run across exactly one OEM key, on the case, that they refused to activate and when I told the customer it wasn’t going to happen he told me his brother had been loading multiple machines from his key and paid for a new one. Bulletproof it ain’t but the 1-2% is closer to .2% at least in my experience. Will not activate automatically online, probably 10%, but a 5 min phone call fixes that pretty much every time. I have had to deal with the actual activation tech support maybe 5 times in same 3 years.
I on the other hand sell about 3-4 licences a month to people with hosed corp/VLK installs.
From your own link:
While a false positive is possible, it is extremely rare. Across over 200 million WGA validations, we have identified only a handful of false positives. Almost all of these were due to data entry errors that were quickly corrected and only occurred for a short period of time.
If you ring Microsoft’s activation line, they’ll sort you out.
I’ve never had a problem with WGA either – it’s just an annoyance, especially if you happen to be following best security practices, such as running as an LUA and using Firefox. Then you suddenly have to run a separate exe and copy-paste the magic code before it’ll let you install patches, Platform SDK etc. The funny part in the article was that someone got Ubuntu to validate as “genuine Windows”.
$150 for a student version of what… $150 is retail for Windows XP Pro, the only “student version” would would find on target shelves would be Microsoft Office.
Yeah, but, see, at this end of the market, I get the impression that the laptops are mostly ex-business jobbies. They’ve been rebuilt by the backyard dude, the original disks are probably long gone. It’s like an I.T. chop shop or something. There may well be a smarter, cheaper way of getting a computer with a proper licence, but it probably requires more effort and smarts than dad is willing to expend.
I hear you man. I know a couple of people that fit that bill.
Can we commit them together?
Amazing as it might sound, the disks don’t matter.
Exept for a handful of machines, an OS installed by the manufacturer can be loaded from just about any OEM copy of the XP/vista discs using the code on the case. We do this dozens of times a month.