I don't use Vista. Unfortunately one of my clients wanted to try it out, so I built a new machine for him. It worked for 30 days and I got a call from my client- Vista kept telling him he needed to 'Activate' Windows.
I had activated when I installed the OS, but I guess it wanted to do it again- you know, just for fun. So, I told it to activate and it said the key was already in use.
Of course it's in use- I already activated! I picked up the phone to call the 888 number since that was my only option.
A chipper female recording answered the phone. "Welcome to the Microsoft Product Activation Center. I can help you activate Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 Small Busin..." yadda ya the list goes on. Sounds like they are feeding me an advertisement for their product that isn't working. Anyway, usually after getting though that it has you enter 8 groups of 6 digits, and then responds with a similarly large number that you enter into your activation window. After entering my digits, the chipper female said "We're sorry, but this key is in use."
Of course it's in use- I already activated! "Please wait while your call is transferred to a representative."Make note- she didn't qualify the term 'representative' with any sort of adjective like 'skilled' or 'competent.' In her thick offshore-outsourced accent the representative asked me to read her all the numbers I had just typed into the phone. She asked if I had recently changed hardware in my computer. "No," I said, "why should that matter?"
It matters because MS doesn't want you moving copies of their OS from machine to machine- even if you did buy it legally. "But it's not
their OS, I bought it!" Nope, still theirs, and it's married to
your hardware, and cannot divorce and remarry. They want to sell you a new copy for each piece of hardware you own. Of course Miss Representative didn't inform me of this, but did tell me I might have to call back if I change hardware... Then, she read a huge string of digits back to me. Vista accepted them, and allowed me to use the computer I built.
But why did it stop working in the first place? Nothing in the hardware had changed, and after a reboot it claimed I had three days to reactivate Windows. Here we go again.
Chipper Female: "Activating your product will take about 6 minutes, if you have an internet connection and haven't already tried the 'Activate by Internet' option, I suggest you try it- it's much faster."Me:
"..."Again, I enter the numbers and it forwards me to a rep. He gives me the same spiel and I say "Look, I'm stuck in an endless loop here. I'm not changing hardware, it deactivates Windows on boot!" After a long pause he says I'll have to talk to another team of people who don't work on Saturday.
That's really great Microsoft. It's bad enough that I'm spending my weekend troubleshooting your product, and now you want me to call back on Monday. At least I'm being paid, but my client can't be happy about that.
And so I googled, and found
plenty of people with the same problem. Apparently Vista had based its hardware detection on some value reported by the Silicon Image SATA card. That value was changing at every boot! So by updating the driver and re-activating Windows, I was able to get it to remember that it was already activated. At least until I swap out a video card or something...
The moral of the story: Don't even bother with Vista. If Microsoft wants to win back their customer base, they need to grow up and realize that anyone who wants to beat their system will find
a way. So just keep it up Microsoft, the more customers you deter with this sort of crap the better. They will all find alternatives- like Mac or Linux.
