re: More on: WGA False Positives

rdamiani — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:58:17 GMT

That's a cop-out. Any company smart enough to find and keep the kinds of folks I keep running into at MS is way too smart to not calculate that rate to at least 6 decimal points.

Pissing off nice people who give you money is stupid. MS is a lot of different things. None of those things are stupid.

re: More on: WGA False Positives

mhornyak — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 09:20:38 GMT

Microsoft sold faulty Vista keys to people who bought the family discount:

http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=37734

Yet more WGA-related breakage. Note the crappy response by the customer service. The customers who desire Vista can either get a refund and pay the non-discount price, or they can sit on the faulty key until Microsoft figures out how to give people what they paid for.

Customer service should be empowered to give customers a $10 rebate, and a 60-day temporary key with no questions asked.

Also, note that people who are using hacked copies of Vista are currently not suffering from this problem. Not only were their copies cheaper, but they work better.

This is why people call it Windows Genuine Disadvantage--because people who hack their copies of Windows get better performance than people who do the right thing.

re: More on: WGA False Positives

alexkoc — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:26:32 GMT

mhornyak, the program you refer to has nothing whatsoever to do with WGA. But I do like your idea about empowering customer service to issue a temporary key. I can imagine some WGA sceanrios where that could possibly be a useful tool for helping customers. Thanks for the idea.

re: More on: WGA False Positives

whyJoe — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 23:14:42 GMT

Oh, you mean like the scenarios where your paying customers get told their machines failed the WGA check? If that happened to me, I'd want more than a $10 rebate, by the way. You'd see me in person up in Redmond.

re: More on: WGA False Positives

calios — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 02:12:33 GMT

The big problem for us customers is that we need reliable systems - any false positive is one too much.

Descision processes on what to rely for WGA approval have to be carefull - till January i had confidence in Microsofts ability to do this right.

Then all of a sudden my Windows XP Pro decided that i had made significant changes to my hardware (using a notebook and neither changed any component or plugged in any additional devices).

It later turned out that convert command of the system partition from FAT32 to NTFS caused that issue.

From that day on my confidence was damaged - i need to rely on the operating system i buy - and when WGA decides to mark my system as false positive on wrong assumption i cannot rely on it anymore.

Sure WGA and Activation are two approches of ensuring proper licensing - but this incidence is proof that mistakes in these systems cannot be avoided - how can Microsoft guarantee that these mistakes wont impact crucial Systems?

To name one - i saw a Windows XP Pro System in a hospitals intensive care unit to control patients life functions last year when i visited a relative.

Remember youre not building Operation Systems for Home use - your OS is used in mission critical environments and has a giant impact on other peoples lives - so dont mess up on WGA false positives or bogus hardware-change reactivation!

Greetings from Germany

Schwarzer Bildschirm entlarvt XP-Raubkopien

SILICON.de — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:05:25 GMT

Microsoft bessert im Kampf gegen Raubkopien das WGA-System (Windows Genuine Advantage) f�r Windows XP nach.