[Gllug] OT: WGA

[Alistair Mann]

general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>  On 28/12/10 19:12, John Edwards wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 06:24:29PM +0000,
> > general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote: <snip>
> >> Oh and, why would you block WGA? If you're running legit software
> >> at best it's pointless, at worst it can prevent you from getting
> >> updates, download and free(beer) software from MS.
> > Because very occasionally it (or the hardware change detection in
> > XP) goes wrong and you have to waste an hour or so finding out what
> > is wrong and being on the phone to Microsoft to get the OS
> > re-activated.
> >
>
>  Must be pretty rare then, I've tripped reactivation maybe two or
>  three times in a decade of working all day with mostly XP home
>  computers. All of those incidents were due to hardware replacements,
>  all of which were sorted in under ten minutes. I'm not sure going out
>  of my way to disable WGA on the hundreds of machines I've installed
>  in the last ten years would have saved me any time on balance.
>
>  I've never seen it go wrong on a machine with a legit COA & a legit
>  install.

I've personally seen it go wrong on two machines without hardware 
changes, belonging to different clients. The apparently unacceptable COA 
checked out against the sticker. Both COAs worked fine after 
reactivation. Both machines had a history of falling over before my 
arrival (not uncommon with residential Windows computers) so I assume 
that something somewhere didn't finish before the next crash. I've 
probably seen well in excess of a thousand different computers like 
these, so while rare, it does happen.

Cheers,
-- 
Alistair Mann
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