I’m just setting up five new PCs for the office which came with XP Pro pre-installed; I’m not getting the usual nags to activate it (which is nice); has MS abandoned the (nightmarish) activation procedure?, or has the manufacturer pre-activated it for me (is this possible without entering some address details and so on?).
No, they have not abandoned product activation.
I don’t know how businesses qualify, but some businesses get the no-activation-required version of XP Pro. For example the XP test computers at work don’t require activation.
I know a lot of people that own legitimate copies of XP Pro, but use a (probably not quite so legal) corporate version of the serial number to bypass what they feel is privacy-infringing big-brother-type snooping by Microsoft. On the other hand, if they have a legitimate copy, I guess it doesn’t matter which serial number they use (anyone every bother to read the EULA to see if there’s a requirement for using the provided serial number?). Of course, I know people with made-at-work copies, which may either be a violation or part of our license. I don’t know. Then, of course, there are a lot of pirates.
The point is, according to your OP, there ARE legitimate versions of XP Pro the don’t require activation.
Could be. I just got a new machine with XP Pro, and before I activated my ISP, every time I opened an app, I got the activation warning. After getting the ISP connection and surfing around a while, I opened Access and clicked the activation button. I recieved “this product has already been activated”. Same for all the other apps. Which, for me, was kinda spooky.
Just in case anyone thinks my ‘nightmarish’ comment above was an anti-MS rant, it wasn’t; my first run in with XP activation (which I do consider a good OS) was bad;
I bought a brand new laptop which I couldn’t activate;
I phoned MS and they asked (quite pointedly) why was I attempting to register this copy of XP on a different machine, I said that I wasn’t and that it was a new machine etc, they told me to contact the manufacturer, which I did.
They told me it was a MS problem and I should talk to MS. -we had about three or four iterations of this until the guy from support told me just to phone up MS and get angry - which advice I hardly needed at that point - MS suddenly caved and gave me the activation code.
I never did find out what went wrong, my assumption is that somewhere out there, somebody activated a bootleg copy (mine passes all the authenticity tests) with an ID the same as mine, although this seems unlikely given what I’ve heard about how the ID is generated.
If you are working at a big company, it’s likely you’re installing the MS Select edition of XP. Select is for big places with lots of computers that would quit buying MS products if they had to enter cd keys or do product activations on each one of 5000 machines, for example.
I just bought a new home PC (Gateway) with Win XP Home Edition, and Gateway had pre-activated it; I was never bugged for activation, not before I went online or after.
Office XP, on the other hand, wanted to be activated, but that was a painless online transaction.
It’s not a big company, but the supplier churns out thousands of generic boxes like these; is there any way to tell what version (select or otherwise) I have?
I have the same with Dell, except in addition if I choose to reinstall XP on the same machine (I believe it makes a check against the BIOS) then I will not have to activate it (I have tried this once and there was no activation).
Dell had a page about this, but I can’t get to it at the minute as their website seems to want a unique ID number that is on my PC at home (I am in the office).
Some versions of XP don’t require activation. I think its the Corp edition.
Microsoft recently released a service pack which makes some significant changes to the activation scheme. Among other things, the product key is now included in the installation ID.
In theory, this should mean that if you are using a cracked copy, MS can check your spoofed or stolen product key against their enormous list and mess with you if they find more than one.
I don’t know whether or not they’re actually doing this, since I won’t buy or use a copy of XP exactly because of the product activation, which as I mentioned long ago, reeks of planned obsolescence. In another four years MS plans to stop “supporting” Windows XP, which may include the issuance of product activation keys. Afterward you might have to either break the law or buy whatever MS is hawking come 2007.
I don’t think the service pack can be applied to XP machines that are not fully installed. Instead, I suspect that is the corporate version of XP Pro which requires no activation.