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[jonny2112]

I have a genuine copy (yes genuine) of XP which I got with a new PC. I have had to replace a faulty hard drive, and in the meantime was working off an old, small drive. Tonight I installed the new drive but when it came to 'activating' Windows, I was informed that my copy was no longer valid for activation and that a new one could be bought. I didn't realise the disc expired so to speak, and was wondering if anyone else had come across this problem.

[Markjay]

Sorry, I was not aware that the activation expired as such...

You may have already activated it several times several times before (there is a limit, though I am not sure what it is)?

Or this may be an OEM version that can not be re-installed...?

Also, are you sure the CD-Key you used actually came with the CD media you have? If it didn't, it may go through the initial installation OK but then not activate.

Last, when the activation fails there is a telephone number displayed which you can call - worth a try, I called them once but didn't get very far (it was OEM and they told me to call HP), but a mate called them and did manage to get an activation code from them over the phone.

[BigCat]

Did you actually use the genuine CD to install the operating system on the new Hard Drive?

I've had lots of problems with authorization, just like yourself, replacing or re-building hard drives (all on genuine HP or Sony hardware) but as MarkJay said, if you follow through the activation procedure you should eventually arrive at a phone number you can call; they should give you a new activation code (I've had to do this more than once).

[TheBoy]

Not used the key on any others?  If not, ring the number...

[sounds2k]

I seem to remember having a similar problem, I think if you re-install to the same hardware within a short space of time it throws a wobbly, Tried again a couple of days later and it was OK - or try calling them if you can't wait ...

[Paul M]

Get a pirate copy, they tend to be corporate versions and as such aren't encumbered with the activation bullsh-t that plagues genuine customers

Seriously, I'm not advocating piracy but with this sort of guff I really wonder why we bother paying M$ for a licence when it just makes us worse off (as personal users). And it's only going to get worse with WG(d)A and Vista's new even more oppressive activation - it will repeatedly call home every 60 days or so and de-activate if it can't validate. Of course we all know the masses in China et all will be running to the bank to buy genuine copies of Vista seeing that M$ has invented the unpirateable OS  

One of many reasons that I've now dumped M$ as my primary desktop, my Windows licence now sits inside a minimal VM and only gets fired up as a last resort to run some Windows only software I can't get by without.

[TheBoy]

Get a pirate copy, they tend to be corporate versions and as such aren't encumbered with the activation bullsh-t that plagues genuine customers

Seriously, I'm not advocating piracy but with this sort of guff I really wonder why we bother paying M$ for a licence when it just makes us worse off (as personal users). And it's only going to get worse with WG(d)A and Vista's new even more oppressive activation - it will repeatedly call home every 60 days or so and de-activate if it can't validate. Of course we all know the masses in China et all will be running to the bank to buy genuine copies of Vista seeing that M$ has invented the unpirateable OS  

One of many reasons that I've now dumped M$ as my primary desktop, my Windows licence now sits inside a minimal VM and only gets fired up as a last resort to run some Windows only software I can't get by without.

And you think Linux is better   - RedHat's scheme is very flaky, and you are knackered without an internet connection.

As I said in a previous thread, I have yet to see WPA or WGA give a false positive. There is always a reason - telephoning them will reveal what.

With your VM - I hope you have a retail version, as it will be unlicenced if it is an OEM version

[TheBoy]

Get a pirate copy, they tend to be corporate versions and as such aren't encumbered with the activation bullsh-t that plagues genuine customers

And we do not allow discussion of copyright theft here  

But, virtually every corporate version available by pirate means will have 1 of the 2 well known keys that the service packs detect and warn.

And the way WGA works, means if WPA works, so will WGA except under very specific circumstances (none of which should happen with correct licenced use)...

[MaxV6]

I'm going to make myself highly unpopular with some members for this, but I think I'm going to be Allowing myself a small moment of long term Mac user smug bastardness....  

There IS a viable, reliable, secure (ish) alternative you know...


buy a Mac.

current number of viable virus threats in the wild for OS X??

ZERO!



and , it actually works !

And

if you're desperate to at least keep M$ whine-doze for some unknowable reason....  , all current intel CPU'd macs can be configured as a dual boot machine, to run Windows instead via "bootcamp"


Of course, Windows on a Mac is probably about as vulnerable as Windows on a PC..   But even then, there are still no Virus threats for the OSX installation...


it actually makes sense you know....  \


Max

AKA "Max the Mac"

[TheBoy]

I'm going to make myself highly unpopular with some members for this, but I think I'm going to be Allowing myself a small moment of long term Mac user smug bastardness....  

There IS a viable, reliable, secure (ish) alternative you know...


buy a Mac.

current number of viable virus threats in the wild for OS X??

ZERO!



and , it actually works !

And

if you're desperate to at least keep M$ whine-doze for some unknowable reason....  , all current intel CPU'd macs can be configured as a dual boot machine, to run Windows instead via "bootcamp"


Of course, Windows on a Mac is probably about as vulnerable as Windows on a PC..   But even then, there are still no Virus threats for the OSX installation...


it actually makes sense you know....  \


Max

AKA "Max the Mac"

There are plenty of PoC ones just waiting for the OS to get some tiny amount of popularity - so keep the AV up to date...

OSX has had its fair share of security flaws though (as has Windows/Linux/Solaris/HPUX)

[Paul M]

Get a pirate copy, they tend to be corporate versions and as such aren't encumbered with the activation bullsh-t that plagues genuine customers

Seriously, I'm not advocating piracy but with this sort of guff I really wonder why we bother paying M$ for a licence when it just makes us worse off (as personal users). And it's only going to get worse with WG(d)A and Vista's new even more oppressive activation - it will repeatedly call home every 60 days or so and de-activate if it can't validate. Of course we all know the masses in China et all will be running to the bank to buy genuine copies of Vista seeing that M$ has invented the unpirateable OS  

One of many reasons that I've now dumped M$ as my primary desktop, my Windows licence now sits inside a minimal VM and only gets fired up as a last resort to run some Windows only software I can't get by without.

And you think Linux is better   - RedHat's scheme is very flaky, and you are knackered without an internet connection.

As I said in a previous thread, I have yet to see WPA or WGA give a false positive. There is always a reason - telephoning them will reveal what.

With your VM - I hope you have a retail version, as it will be unlicenced if it is an OEM version

Red Hat's scheme is only for corporate customers and it's more of a support contract than bearing down on you for simply having their OS installed. I can download any version of Fedora (or previous versions of Red Hat before Enterprise Linux) and install them on as many machines as I like. Anyway, I don't use Red Hat as personally I'm not too impressed with it as a desktop OS, it makes sense in the corp world where stability and support are important, but personally I much prefer Debian - it's also really stable (if you choose the stable variant, but even testing is pretty robust) just without quite the support of RHEL which I'd never use anyway. And I also think apt is a fantastic package management system, if I want to say use Inkscape to edit some SVGs (not hypothetical, I actually do) then I run "sudo apt-get install inkscape" and a few secs later it's there in the applications menu ready to run. Something Windows sorely lacks these days... but I'm sure you knew all that

I don't believe the "no false positives" is a valid reason to have to continually check in to M$ just because I have their OS installed. Alcohol breath test machines are pretty reliable but I would still object to having a cop standing next to my car once a month waiting to take a breath test before I can drive, even though there's no evidence to suggest I ever have or am ever likely to drive under the influence. Taking such measures under reasonable suspicion is perfectly reasonable, but simply blanket assuming everyone is up to illegal activities unless they can prove otherwise really does not sit tight with me at all.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is the kind of thing that gives me the shivers... No opposition to random searches in the street every day, just in case you're carring drugs or weapons? How about your home, I'm sure as a good citizen you have nothing illegal there either?

Funnily enough "Sir Bill" is in Edinburgh tonight... maybe I should invite him to my house to give it a good search in case I've got some long lost Windows for Workgroups 3.11 floppies lying around that should have been destroyed with the host PC they came with. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6311911.stm

BTW The copy of WinXP I have on my desktop (now within VMWare Player) is a retail version that I got as part of some student thing they done when I was an undergrad. My laptop's is an OEM but that's running dual boot, I use WIndows on that more often than I'd like to mainly to get round the driver issues with the sh-tty Broadcom 802.11a/b/g card built into it.

[Paul M]

I'm going to make myself highly unpopular with some members for this, but I think I'm going to be Allowing myself a small moment of long term Mac user smug bastardness....  

There IS a viable, reliable, secure (ish) alternative you know...


buy a Mac.

current number of viable virus threats in the wild for OS X??

ZERO!



and , it actually works !

And

if you're desperate to at least keep M$ whine-doze for some unknowable reason....  , all current intel CPU'd macs can be configured as a dual boot machine, to run Windows instead via "bootcamp"


Of course, Windows on a Mac is probably about as vulnerable as Windows on a PC..   But even then, there are still no Virus threats for the OSX installation...


it actually makes sense you know....  \


Max

AKA "Max the Mac"

I've used OS X a few times and it does have some nice features, but there are things that annoy me about it. Maybe I'd get over that if I persevered but much as I've tried I always prefer getting back to a Gnome desktop. I just find myself more productive in it. I find OS X isn't so great under heavy load either, the scheduler doesn't seem to be so great which I'm very surprised at as it's based on FreeBSD. I don't know enough about it to work out what's going on so I can't really say if it's a setup issue or what.

I got my current laptop about 6 months before the announcement of Apple going to Intel; if they'd done so earlier I'd almost certainly have tried a Macbook instead as could still get Winblows onto it -- I don't have to pay for my software, it's funded as part of my sponsorship so although my laptop Win is OEM I also have fully licenced copies of Office 2k3 Pro, Acrobat, Visio, McAfee and Endnote among others, so an XP licence for a Macbook along with Parallels or whatever would be no probs. Unfortunately I can only get one laptop during my studies so chances of replacing it are damn near nil; I'm reasonably happy with the current dual-boot tho, except the driver issues.

[MaxV6]

There are plenty of PoC ones just waiting for the OS to get some tiny amount of popularity - so keep the AV up to date...

OSX has had its fair share of security flaws though (as has Windows/Linux/Solaris/HPUX)

AFAIK, none of the PoC types yet shown will work without admin password entry to authorise it.

and significantly fewer flaws than Windows... and many of those that have existed, were actually related to M$ software....    even back in OS7.5/8/9 the few viable security flaws were largely to do with M$ explorer and mail apps/.   the other weakness exploited was the hypercard system.

the ONLY pure Mac virus i've ever encountered in the wild was one called Seven Dust...  back in pre-OSX days.
I've provided support for several hundred professional  Mac based AV systems........  1 virus in all that time... one one machine only....  

Paul M,

I should own up and admit i use, and support,  both major Platforms for work.....  which is in the Audio-Visual industry

OSX is generally more responsive under our normally heavy work load conditions than Windows....   this we've tested on both the same intel based hardware, and comparable previous systems between PPC and intel hardware

it is however not perfect......  if it was, i'd probably not be sitting here typing this........    

and believe me, Apple have almost as much of a "Screw the users, we're like, some kind of nerds god" complex as M$

I trust Steve Jobs as far as I can throw his office building or bank balance...

to be honest, i'd probably trust Bill Gates more......

But damn it, Apple just keep building products that work well enough and reliably enough to keep me, and many clients, coming back for more.

but also because they keep buying the software companies we rely on.., and switching off the PC versions.....  

it's not all roses , fine wine and pretty women in the Orchard.....

[TheBoy]

There are plenty of PoC ones just waiting for the OS to get some tiny amount of popularity - so keep the AV up to date...

OSX has had its fair share of security flaws though (as has Windows/Linux/Solaris/HPUX)

AFAIK, none of the PoC types yet shown will work without admin password entry to authorise it.

and significantly fewer flaws than Windows... and many of those that have existed, were actually related to M$ software....    even back in OS7.5/8/9 the few viable security flaws were largely to do with M$ explorer and mail apps/.   the other weakness exploited was the hypercard system.

the ONLY pure Mac virus i've ever encountered in the wild was one called Seven Dust...  back in pre-OSX days.
I've provided support for several hundred professional  Mac based AV systems........  1 virus in all that time... one one machine only....  

Paul M,

I should own up and admit i use, and support,  both major Platforms for work.....  which is in the Audio-Visual industry

OSX is generally more responsive under our normally heavy work load conditions than Windows....   this we've tested on both the same intel based hardware, and comparable previous systems between PPC and intel hardware

it is however not perfect......  if it was, i'd probably not be sitting here typing this........    

and believe me, Apple have almost as much of a "Screw the users, we're like, some kind of nerds god" complex as M$

I trust Steve Jobs as far as I can throw his office building or bank balance...

to be honest, i'd probably trust Bill Gates more......

But damn it, Apple just keep building products that work well enough and reliably enough to keep me, and many clients, coming back for more.

but also because they keep buying the software companies we rely on.., and switching off the PC versions.....  

it's not all roses , fine wine and pretty women in the Orchard.....

There is at least 1 PoC OSX virus (actually, may be a worm) that spreads via flaw in OSX (most likely now fixed). I don't really get involved with Macs now, so am out of touch.

As I said, once it becomes popular....


My biggest concern with the less popular, seemingly secure, operating systems is users become cocky with regards to security, and we all know that leads to problems, as they don't keep AV/Patching etc up to date.

[TheBoy]

Red Hat's scheme is only for corporate customers and it's more of a support contract than bearing down on you for simply having their OS installed. I can download any version of Fedora (or previous versions of Red Hat before Enterprise Linux) and install them on as many machines as I like. Anyway, I don't use Red Hat as personally I'm not too impressed with it as a desktop OS, it makes sense in the corp world where stability and support are important, but personally I much prefer Debian - it's also really stable (if you choose the stable variant, but even testing is pretty robust) just without quite the support of RHEL which I'd never use anyway. And I also think apt is a fantastic package management system, if I want to say use Inkscape to edit some SVGs (not hypothetical, I actually do) then I run "sudo apt-get install inkscape" and a few secs later it's there in the applications menu ready to run. Something Windows sorely lacks these days... but I'm sure you knew all that

I don't believe the "no false positives" is a valid reason to have to continually check in to M$ just because I have their OS installed. Alcohol breath test machines are pretty reliable but I would still object to having a cop standing next to my car once a month waiting to take a breath test before I can drive, even though there's no evidence to suggest I ever have or am ever likely to drive under the influence. Taking such measures under reasonable suspicion is perfectly reasonable, but simply blanket assuming everyone is up to illegal activities unless they can prove otherwise really does not sit tight with me at all.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is the kind of thing that gives me the shivers... No opposition to random searches in the street every day, just in case you're carring drugs or weapons? How about your home, I'm sure as a good citizen you have nothing illegal there either?

Funnily enough "Sir Bill" is in Edinburgh tonight... maybe I should invite him to my house to give it a good search in case I've got some long lost Windows for Workgroups 3.11 floppies lying around that should have been destroyed with the host PC they came with. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6311911.stm

BTW The copy of WinXP I have on my desktop (now within VMWare Player) is a retail version that I got as part of some student thing they done when I was an undergrad. My laptop's is an OEM but that's running dual boot, I use WIndows on that more often than I'd like to mainly to get round the driver issues with the sh-tty Broadcom 802.11a/b/g card built into it.

RedHat's (and now SUSE) insistance that you must have a support contract for each instance installed is desperately close to Microsoft's model, and don't believe for a minute that some kind of activation scheme wont be implemented.  Slowly, all (stable) Linux will go commercial - it simply is not viable for any company to produce quality, stable distributions with no income.  Fedora was born out of the demise of RH, and done in such a way to now become a Alpha/Beta platform for RHEL.  Its not really stable enough to use.

My favourite Linux is, like you, Debian. Probably not through choice, simply because its the last remaining no cost quality stable distribution. Alas, how long can the business model survive. If Debian goes commercial (or bust), it will knock out not only Debian, but many other ditributions based on it.


Back to WPA/WGA, its seemless (apart from a phone call if not internet connected), reliable, and non intrusive.  We have monitored the encrypted packets, and though they are encrypted, they are small. That leads us to believe Microsoft's claims that no personally indentifiable info is passed.


I know a lot of people don't like WPA/WGA.  Many of the people who it has actually inconvenienced are the people who shared their W2K/98/95 CDs to all their mates. Windows piracy was rife, along with Office.  So many people were using the well known corporate keys that when SP1 was released (which looked for these keys), that was when the anti WPA brigade started. As did the WPA cracks. WGA is a fairly simple system to check that Windows is properly activated, and hence not a system that has had a WPA crack run on it.  Also, WGA does not (currently) run for critical security updates.


As for me being a good citizen, my systems are pretty well licenced. All 3 laptops have their XP OEM licences. The 2 desktops have an XP OEM and a Retail licence. The W2003 server has a licence with 10 CALs, the Exchange is licenced. Office is licenced through a combination of Retail licences and Open Licencing 'Home Use' licences. So pretty good in my book.  The Redhat subscription for the server that runs this place is soon to expire, I home I have time to migrate it to Debian before it does, as I don't want to buy another.  But I have been known to break the speed limit