Genuine Advantage Weirdness?

[houseisland]

Has anyone else noticed an increased incidence of Genuine Advantage weirdness is the last week or so?

I have seen a few XP Pro and Home boxes fail or semi-fail the push down Genuine Advantage test recently -- these boxes all having the-sticker-on-the-case legitimacy. The ones that fail fail -- curiously one of them did not fail with a reloading of the OS. The ones that semi-fail suddenly require re-activation.

My wife's PC just semi-failed. And it appears to have denied her any form of Internet access all day long until I came home and ran the activation wizard. She was freaked out and pissed off -- frustration vented at me -- thank you Microsoft!



XP has been installed on her machine for about three or four years. Somewhere in this time it once asked for re-activation, either when I upgraded the CPU or replaced a failing hard drive. It passed all earlier Genuine Advantage tests, of which there have been at least two if memory serves correctly. How many times does it need to be tested for the Genuine Advantage?



Most tedious. If any of this nonsense happens again at home, I will blow away XP on wife's PC and load Ubuntu without a second thought, no tears shed. There is nothing that she really needs Windows for anyway.

____________________________________________



It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[NooNoo]

Don't know house... will ask a few questions if you like and see what that turns up?

[musicman7722]

I have seden it crop up alot lately and always refuse it now and try to turn it off from auto download again. Ny 2c

Chris P.

[slgrieb]

House, I'd say you're just paranoid, if you weren't correct. MS has indeed blessed us with a shiny, new Windows Genuine Advantage Tool (I think we all understand that "tool" is a euphemism) and it has some of the same problems that I saw in the first release. Too many false positives, and I'm also seeing broken network connectivity. The new version takes a hardware survey of your computer, so I can only speculate that perhaps, the new validation system is responsible.

[houseisland]

We're back.....

Only about a week later, there is yet another Genuine Advantage test. My wife's PC passed this time with flying colours -- no reactivation required.

This is the fourth test? And it is getting very tiresome.

I am about to set up a test Ubuntu box for her, and if she can live with it (which I suspect she can), then bye bye XP Home.



____________________________________________



It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[NooNoo]

For certain updates you will always be asked to complete validation... this is not activation.

[houseisland]

For certain updates you will always be asked to complete validation... this is not activation.

I know this. You know this. But try to explain this to the delightful and academically brilliant, but decidely non-techie, user I am married to. Things like this freak her out.



____________________________________________



It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

[slgrieb]

After several glitches with the new validation "utility" most of the problems I've seen have gone away. Finally. On several systems I had to attempt validation 3 or 4 times before it succeeded, and I replaced 1 SIS NIC with a Realtek. My issues all seem resolved, and at least the utility doesn't sit in the system tray staring at you as though you are criminal awaiting his chance.

[futuretech]

I have found on two machines that started that failure ti validate stuff that setting the security level on internet options down to medium and restarting has gotten rid of the issue. When asked to validate before the settings it failed after changing the security level it passed.

On both machines they were repair installs and i had just called Microsoft and ran through their validation phone calls and after a few updates and reboots is when they failed.