...And the rains came

[altivo]

Tornado watch, severe thunderstorm watch, then the warnings came just as we were shutting up the library and I found I needed an amphibious vehicle to get home. It was the kind of rain where windshield wipers don't do anything, and the lightning strikes seem to start at the zenith and come down all around the horizon. I really did expect to start floating (or sinking) a couple of times.

It lasted only as long as it took me to get home, of course, and was letting up as I pulled into the drive. Probably not a whole lot of actual accumulation, won't know until we can see the rain gauge in the morning.

Oh, and I take back my compliment to Microsoft from yesterday. They have also done something I find unforgivable. The license keys they print on those little "Certificates of Authenticity" that are stuck to PCs made by Dell, Compaq, HP, and Gateway? They made them all invalid because they decided that people would use them to steal copies of Windows XP. Duh. Should have thought of that before doing such a stupid thing, idiots. So if you have to replace a CPU chip or even just the primary hard disk on one of those machines, and you reinstall XP from the legitimate restore CD that was provided with the machine, it's only good for 30 days before it quits working. It demands the key, and will not accept the one from the sticker. So you have to call them and convince them that it really is the same machine before they give you the "real" key. No wonder I hate Microsoft. That's just sleazy.

I'm now convinced that the rumors are true. One of these days, M$ is going to start making their software expire and quit working every year until you pay ransom to get it reactivated. Time to get yourself loose from the tyranny of Windows, people.

Comments

[rjtremor.livejournal.com]

So THAT'S what happened. Weiiiiiird. See, the coon and I had been doing a bunch of work on computers this weekend, and his parents' computer ended up getting a motherboard and processor like mine. Unlike mine though, I run 2k, and they have an EMachines computer that HAD XP Home... now has XP Pro w/generated code. I'm glad my copy of XP I have is a corp. edition, no key(apparently). I don't know if I'll use it at this point though.. 2K needs a reinstall at some point though. =oP

[rjtremor.livejournal.com]

Feel free to screen this by the way, in case Big Brother's looking in on ya. =oP

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Although you're supposed to stick those things on the computer its loaded on, I just stick it on the manual with the cd that way if ever I need to reinstall I just whip out the booklet. Apparantly they let you use the code on the sticker a number of times then you have to get it "reset". Windows home and professional editions of XP require "activation" once reinstalled. Corporate edition doesn't require "activation"

But yes if they keep trying this arsy activation or online re-license nonsense I will change. Not to mention all those levels of the new windows.. "Vista" or whatever it is.

I suppose its too much to expect they've gone through all the old redundant code and got rid of all that legacy bollocks.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm not doing anything that should make me worry about "Big Brother".

I wouldn't bother to actually steal XP. No use or need for it. But people I work with are addicted to Windows and fear any change, so they have to be supplied with their fix. I suppose somewhere in the legal gibberish of the license agreement they have managed to force us to agree that the license is tied to a specific CPU and motherboard, the way IBM and other mainframe vendors used to do. But it seems to me that the courts invalidated that stuff for the hardware vendors years ago and here it is rearing its vicious head again. Intel has cooperated, of course, by giving them unique identifiers for each CPU chip so they have something to go by.

Changing out the CPU is a rare occurrence, though. It appears that they are also locking down your hard drive, which is ridiculous. Most of those are cheap trash that is almost guaranteed to fail within three years. I'm surprised I haven't encountered this before, since at least half of our Dell machines end up having their hard drives swapped under warranty before the period runs out. Typically the replacement that Dell supplies is two or four times larger than the original and made by a different manufacturer. That's what seems to have triggered this episode, replacing the original equipment Maxtor with a Hitachi supplied direct from Dell.

If you want me to screen your comments to conceal your own identity, just let me know. ;p

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Are you kidding? My experience with MS tech support has convinced me that they have no idea at all how their code works or what is buried in there. Memory and storage are cheap, so who cares is they waste a GB or two?

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Techsupport is a bit different, the poor souls who's job it is to try and answer questions they couldn't possibly know since the turnover is so huge.
The frontline infantry against angry customers, pawns of the management led to the slaughter only to be cast aside when burnt out. As you can see I have a great sympathy for callcentre and tech support staff ^.^

[corelog.livejournal.com]

XP activation (on retail copies) takes the key and hashes it with about ten values gathered from various bits of your hardware--hard drive, motherboard, CPU, memory, video card, disk drives, etc. etc. After activation, that key is locked to those hash values, and if the overall sum of the hashes changes by more than a preset margin, Windows will deactivate and you must call Microsoft so they can unlock the key for new activation on the new hash sum. (See here (DOC) or here (HTML).)

You can upgrade some stuff without changing the hash value by too much, and so not many people run into this...except those people who actively upgrade and maintain their hardware, sometimes running through several different machines.

Something I'd do is, if the primary hard disk is still good but needs replacing, is image the current install to the new drive. Windows only checks activation codes on a new installation--if you just image the stuff over (and keep the same BIOS/drive geometry), OOBE won't run. (OOBE is the Windows activation service.)

Of course, if you have volume install media and a volume license key, you can install Windows without having to go through activation. Which is why most pirated copies of Windows use stolen or leaked volume keys. The only time the volume license key is checked is if you want to download something other than security updates from MS (during Genuine Windows Validation). Fortunately, MS is not so cruel as to withhold security updates from the pirates, so the rest of us don't have to be bombarded by these compromised machines...as long as they turn on the updates in the first place...

[pioneer11.livejournal.com]

Glad you got home safely! Though, I admit, like Mrs. Who in
"Wrinkle In Time"; "Wild weather is my glory!"

Just not in the car. @.@

As for the windows key thing...thats very disturbing news. I have
a very old copy of Windows 98 around with its own key not on
a machine. Outside of that its the outside of computers that
I rely on for those keys because the machines I've bought in
the last several years do /not/ have them anywhere else! I do
have reinstall and backup cd's but they don't have the precious
keys.

This could get...interesting. O.o

[pioneer11.livejournal.com]

Sorry, Mrs. Whatsit...its been a few years since I read that
story to the kids.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Fond as I am of that book, I wouldn't have remembered Which Witch it was that said that particular thing. :)

As far as I know, the serial number on the label issue applies only to Windows XP and only to serial numbers issued by the big computer manufacturers. Someone said it was the top twenty. As far as I can see, it's just another example of Microsoft arrogance and disregard for their legitimate customers, and one more good reason NOT to use Windows.

Never having installed XP before at all, I was unaware of this license/serial issue. What do users do who have no modem and no internet connection? Apparently they cannot activate Windows XP at all.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This week is the first time ever in my life that I've dealt with XP installation. I'm irritated by its slowness, aggravated by the number of patches, and furious about the arrogance with the licensing and keys. What happens to the end user with no internet and no modem? I guess he gets stuck with Windows ME. Gah.

Ghosting the image and restoring it was not an option in these cases. The system had been compromised excessively by the Comprise modifications applied on top of it. Most of the machines seem not to have changed enough from the original Dell spec to cause an issue, though.

The boss is out of town until next week, so I still don't have the answer about volume keys. I don't think we have one, but now I'm wondering just what we do have. Several machines were upgraded last year from Windows 98 to XP Pro. This was done with an academic license of some sort, not with consumer grade packages and keys. I didn't do it, the consultants did (against my wishes.) I can find no record of the upgrade licensing, nor the key or media used to perform it. They may have done it with their own media and keys, and kept the license fees for themselves for all I know.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I do too, but only if they pay attention to me when I talk. If I provide a detailed description of a problem, complete with error codes and so forth, and I get back a standard parroted answer that is obviously completely irrelevant to the question, I lose my temper in a hurry. When the tech support call has obviously been outsourced to Asia I am insulted that the company thinks so little of its customers. Hewlett Packard is now on my dung list for that. Dell has so far continued to connect me with people in the US, though the last one was obviously pretty hung over or sleep deprived.

[pioneer11.livejournal.com]

"Apparently they cannot activate Windows XP at all."

Thats the exact problem. Fortunetly I've got a hack or
two to get around it, but really...should I /have/ to resurt
to "gray area" software to use a machine that I've legally paid
for, including the software? I'd dearly love to go over to 'nix,
except that I'm fond of my games and as far as I understand I
couldn't play 90 percent or more of current computer games on
the market.

Now...a dual boot system...hmm.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I dual booted for years, until I realized that Windows was taking up half my disk space and only getting booted once a month or so. That's when I tossed it. Not missed, either.

I think games do better than that now. The WinE project folks include a lot of gamers and they focus more energy than I personally would like on making current game software run on Linux with WinE. If it will run on Windows 98SE, odds are good that they have it running or will have it soon. If it absolutely requires XP, then the chances are slimmer. Games that have Mac OSX versions should port to Linux quite readily, all it needs is for users to start pressuring the game software companies to market native Linux versions.

[kamodragon.livejournal.com]

Are there really any legit alternatives to MS that work well and are user friendly with most things available?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sure. The best known would be Macintosh, and undoubtedly Mac OS will soon be available for Intel machines. But that's likely to have the same licensing and cost issues as Microsoft.

Linux and FreeBSD are readily available at little or no cost, run well on most Intel or AMD hardware, and are just as friendly and have all the same functionality available. Linux distributions such as Ubuntu are quite suitable for someone with no UNIX or command line experience to install and run. They provide a graphical setup from the start that has "control panels" and such just like Windows does. There are differences between some basic Linux operations and the way things work in UNIX systems, one example being the need to "mount" a removable disk or CD before it is readable, and "unmount" it before removing it. But these things are easy for anyone to learn with a little instruction or a beginner's book. Many Windows application programs, including games, can be run on Linux machines by using either wine (the windows adaptor software that provides a windows like running environment for the program) or VMware (which allows you to create an entire virtual Windows installation that runs in a window or on a separate screen, but you have to have valid Windows installation media to do it.)

There is also ReactOS, an open source Windows XP lookalike, but I haven't seen it and don't know how far along that project has gotten.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

To put this another way, I just finished removing Windows 98 and XP from all the public access computers in my library, and replacing it with Linux. The new system has been active for two weeks now, and 99% of our users haven't noticed anything significantly different except for the fact that I took away their floppy drive access on some machines and replaced it with a USB connector they can use a flash drive on.

We replaced Internet Explorer with Epiphany (a Mozilla/Netscape based browser) and Microsoft Office with OpenOffice. The interfaces are so similar that many users haven't even noticed that we changed anything beyond making the login screen look different.

[ruwhei.livejournal.com]

One of my major complaints with linux was its poor remote desktop capability. Oh, sure, ssh works great for text services and for what it is. But who wouldn't want to get the pretty gnome/kde desktop and therefore use graphical enabled programs, like Openoffice?

For years I struggled, and hated, VNC. VNC was slow and pathetic, and compared to windows RDP, primitive. Linux zealots insisted on VNC, insecure and clunky though it was, and I rebelled.

Today I ran across FreeNX, and it is an absolutely wonderful linux remote control desktop program. It enables linux terminal server abilities, so you can give multiple users a centrally controlled desktop.

It is extremely fast. One of my major complaints about Linux is gone.

[kyhwana.livejournal.com]

Oh! No wonder I had to use a pirated copy of XP on my roommates mother's HP, when the key on the sticker didn't work. Good work MS!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Bandwidth has always been an issue with me, so the idea of a completely remote desktop has never even occurred to me as desirable. I don't much care for the implementations that have been provided to do that in Windows either, as far as that goes.

You can use X as a remote client for any number of servers (display screens) if you have the processing power, of course. That's what it was designed to do. But since most of the local systems are usually running Windows, you need an x-server for Windows. These exist, but are either expensive commercial products or unstable shareware.

Linux to Linux does work, and I use it here once in a while just with the bare facilities provided by X itself.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

If you're re-installing on a machine with the original sticker, and are installing the same version of XP (no fair upgrading Home to Pro or Corporate) then Microsoft will enable the installation. But you have to call their 800 number, tell them what you are doing and why, and answer their questions. Apparently they can tell from the number on the sticker who the manufacturer was, when the OS was installed, and some details about the hardware configuration. Convince them you're legit and they re-enable the key.

[kyhwana.livejournal.com]

Well this was a pro sticker and I was trying to stick pro on it. Screw having to call MS.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Quite a sales talk. Unfortunately, I really soured on Apple's bundled marketing strategy long, long ago. Like around OS 6 and the Mac II. ;p

I am extremely resistant to being single-tracked for sourcing by the dog in the manger strategy. I also absolutely hated Mac OS 6 and have never looked back. I'm sure it's much better now, but I just don't need to revisit, especially with the cost of their hardware.

I won't criticize anyone for using Apple products other than to say you've got more spending money than I have (if that's a criticism.)