Still has me shutdown.. i have a vista drive for my laptop, i was GOING to work on some DX Sidebar gadgets but .. powered up Vista (first time in about 2-3 weeks).......

YOUR KEY IS INVALID

Only 3 options.

1. Enter a New Key
2. Call Dell
3. use the computer with LIMITED access.. Limited.. ROFL - a web browser to Microsoft and thats it.

So.. im still off line on vista, not sure when ill try again. Love it.. this is why Vista will not be accepted into the main-stream business world. Imagine if this happened to your entire company on a monday morning? Can you imagine the IT dept?

This should tell MS they need to find another way to "protect" their s/w that the WGA is NOT the way to go. It only shows that a single point of failure in this system and your computer wont work. There wasnt even a "our server is down" it was "YOU STOLE THIS.."

MS needs to wake up before they are gone.

Any business deploying Vista without a corporate image with a valid key already activated deserves to be shut down.  I think this is more a MS problem with redundancy and resiliency and not a problem with WGA.  I am not a big fan of WGA . . but I think it's practically invisible for most of their user base (who gets Windows pre-installed on the PC or uses the "recovery disk" to restore after a problem)  LMAO . .  who's going to step in?  Apple?  Not with their cost of ownership and hardware controls.  Linux?  Not with the perception that you have to be a uber-geek to support it.

Vista will be the accepted standard as people upgrade; even more so as SP1 and 2 roll out.

Oh how quickly we forget, as humans when we attempt anything two things can happen, it will work or it won't work. Oops!   

You would think that MS would run some test with quality control before releasing updates, but then maybe they did which points out other problems.   

Bud.. my drive WAS VALIDATED! This was the first time i loaded it in about a month, it was from a "corporate" image disc with a VALID key, soooo...



Yes i see more and more people moving to ANYTHING other than windows, Linux, Ubuntu, Apple, etc.

I also see how this could be a MAJOR problem for companies like our that use windows (and unix) as a base for our control systems (because the customers WANTED windows), imagine all the plants with windows running them not being able to authenticate themselves and shutting down? What then? Its these kinds of things that make me wince when i look at the next 2-3 years upgrades for our customers, its going to be a nightmare. I would much rather we move to a proprietary version of Linux then use windows.

Its things like this that make corporations SHUTTER when they see their only choice is to be forced to upgrade (UP?) but thats just my 0.02

Ironically,the real pirates probably don't care a toss about any of this and will continue to 'get away with it'.  

Heh, haven't tried a Windows Update in a while. I run XP. When I saw a few months or so that one of the "updates" it wanted to put on my system was to check my windows key to see that it was valid, I said "do not install and do not ask me again." I run a valid version of Windows. But I don't need Windows snooping in on my computer and possibly screwing up telling me that my copy is invalid. Guess I was right.

First of all anytime a major supplier, in this instance Microsoft, causes important customers a significant outage on their computer systems you can call it an MS problem or a WGA problem the effect will be the same on the customer. They will not trust their mission critical computer systems to Microsoft. Especially, since this is for something as self serving to Microsoft as validating OS copies. An OS install that was valid by the terms of its license shouldn't suddenly become invalid due to a Microsoft Web site glitch. End users won't tolerate that sort of thing. Especially when they are end users of mission critical PC based systems. If Vista were in wide spread use instead of XP there would be a revolt in Microsoft's customer base. RomanDA makes some good points if you ask me.

The issue of whether WGA is bad or not (it is) is an ancillary issue.

If Microsoft were truly serious about their stated purpose for WGA, they would not allow it to be (or be controlled by) a single point of failure. Reliable, high availability systems are a commodity these days, and there's no legitimate excuse for this kind of failure (certainly not for a company with the resources of Microsoft). It is incompetence, pure and simple. It's either incompetence in the server room, or it's incompetence in management.

It is said, 'do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence', but I tend to go with the corollary of that statement, 'any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.'

I generally have nothing against Microsoft, at least as far as their software goes, some of it is quite good, and I find it useful to be conversant in as many platforms as possible.

However, WGA (and the stated reasons for it) is disingenuous. It does absolutely nothing to curtail the primary sources of piracy, at best, it makes casual piracy just a tad more difficult, but it doesn't really even do much for that.

I'm completely okay with Microsoft working to profit from their work, and to discourage piracy as they can. However, inconveniencing your honest customers and treating them like criminals, all the while having no real effect on piracy, isn't the way to do it.

I've been worried about this for years. This is a HUGE reason why I stuck with Windows 2000.

WGA only exists to inconvenience end users from casually pirating the OS from their more knowledgeable friends.