Spitting Into the Wind

Microsoft has released WGA Notifications application which effectively turned Microsoft Windows operating system into a ‘nagware’, with a “This copy of Windows is not genuine” warning. What the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications application does what it will check your Microsoft Windows XP validity. If it found that the copy of Windows XP is not validated, not genuine, counterfeit, unlicensed, pirated, illegal, unauthorised or simply failed the Windows Genuine Advantage validation process, then the notification messages will appear at various places and time.

I was given the computer to clean up the spyware. Who would expect Microsoft the be the major culprit. This extra cleanup took a good hour, by the time I found the posts and followed a mixture of the workarounds, shutting down and restarting, booting into safe mode, and changing the way windows updates works. I would be interested to know if Microsoft is keeping a tally on the machines that fail the validation. I think about half. Another quarter already have the patches and legitimisers in place, I imagine, making only one quarter of users with a valid copy of Windows. I'm spitting into the wind here and wouldn't really have a clue, but when you think about the money that Microsoft have made over the years, my sympathy does not extend far.