Wednesday, June 5, 2002

The Joys of MS Product Activation -- 11:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Loyd Case at Extremetech tells of his recent problems with Microsoft product activation on a laptop. Apparently both Office XP and Windows XP mysteriously stopped running and demanded to be reactivated. That must be kind of like how Windows 98 occasionally "forgets" that I have a USB mouse and installs the USB drivers all over again for no apparent reason.

That's my gripe with things like this. They really don't prevent piracy, they just annoy legitimate users. It's like the SafeDisc copy protection. It causes my CD drive to go into convulsions, causes massive slowdowns in games like Morrowind, caused Unreal Tournament to have problems installing out of the box, and yet hacks to circumvent it pop up on the 'Net within moments of a game's release. Why bother?

J.t.Qbe comments: In the case of XP, a crack appeared before the OS was even officially released. And in the case of Morrowind, SafeDisc caused a really noticeable performance hit--I gained at least 25-30% framerate after getting the hacked version.

In the case of XP though, it's a question of who really owns your data? Are you keeping personal or company data in proprietary file formats on a proprietary office system on a proprietary OS which is owned and controlled by a monopoly which clearly has its own interests in mind rather than yours? And if so, doesn't that bother you?

News for 06/05/2002

The Haus is powered by:

All original information on this website is copyright © TheHaus.Net, 1999-2005. The use of original images, text, and/or code from this website without expressed written consent is prohibited. The authors of this site cannot be held responsible for any damage, real or imagined, which comes from the use of information presented on this site. All trademarks used are the properties of their respective owners. This site is not to be used as a floatation device (but if you try, I want a video tape of it).