Activation absurdity

4 March 2008 - 16:48

Microsoft lost the plot a long time ago in its quest to prevent piracy of its products. It expects users to jump through hoops and put up with intrusive "genuine Windows" checks to an extent that no other software vendor could get away with, solely because it has no real competition in the OS market. However, I hadn't realized the extent of the absurdity until I had to reactivate a copy of Windows Vista this afternoon.

The copy in question was an original Vista installation DVD that had been installed on a partition on my laptop. Following my decision to switch to Linux for everyday work, the hard drive - including the Vista partition - was wiped clean and Linux was installed on it. Eventually, Vista was reinstalled in a virtual machine, running under this copy of Linux. Upon activation, the system reported that the product code had been used before, and would not activate it.

Fair enough. It had been used before. But wouldn't it make sense, if you were going to enforce just one installation, to provide a "deactivate" option so that someone who was planning to move it from one system to another could do so without having to go through the rigmarole that followed?

Because the product code had been used before, I was given two options (besides that of purchasing an additional license.) I could use the "automated phone activation system", or I could activate Vista over the phone. I chose the first option.

The activation wizard gave me a number to call, and presented me with nine blocks of six digits. After I got through on the phone I had to enter each of these blocks of digits, one at a time, using the phone key pad. As someone who is dyslexic about numbers, and usually switches digits around, it was quite a challenge to enter this many digits correctly.

The next part was an even bigger struggle, as the phone system read back another nine groups of six digits, which I had to type in to the activation wizard. It read them back quite quickly, so you have to concentrate pretty hard. Fortunately at the end of each group you can press a key to repeat the group or go on to the next one.

Amazingly, Vista was activated at the end of this process. However, I was fully expecting it to fail, since the recorded voice had told me before reading the nine groups of numbers that this would activate my copy of Windows XP, not Vista!

Microsoft must have spent a fortune in time and effort developing its activation system, but did they have to come up with something so complicated? And why on earth is it necessary to phone up and manually key in a set of numbers, when you are already connected to a Microsoft server that could do it online? It's simply ludicrous. Any ISV who tried it would soon be out of business.