IMPORTANT CHANGES TO VISTA ACTIVATION

[Conor]

To: Microsoft Partners

From: Allison Watson

Subject: Important activation changes to Windows Vista

Date: April 27, 2007

As a valued partner and trusted advisor to our customers, I wanted to
re-iterate Microsoft?s commitment to helping protect consumers and
software resellers from the risks associated with pirated software.
Millions of PCs that ship each year end up with non-genuine Windows®
software, which puts you at a competitive disadvantage, and your
customers at risk of a sub-optimal experience.

The significant anti-piracy technologies built into Windows Vista?
software are designed to make the widespread pirating of Windows Vista
more difficult. Now, all customers who deploy Windows Vista must
successfully activate their product using a genuine product key. If a
non-genuine product key is used in activation, customers will
experience reduced functionality and lose certain features, such as
Microsoft Aero and ReadyBoost.

To avoid potential business disruptions and maintain the highest level
of satisfaction with Windows Vista deployments, the most important
activation changes for you to be aware of and to inform your customers
about are:

1. Activation: In the first 30 days of use, all new installations of
Windows Vista must be activated by the OEM, through Windows Vista
volume licensing technologies, or by the end customer. If Windows Vista
is not activated in the first 30 days, the system will operate in a
reduced functionality mode.
2. Validation: In order to protect users from being victimized by
counterfeit software, and to protect Microsoft?s intellectual property,
Windows Vista includes ongoing validation. Through validation, if non-
genuine Windows Vista is detected (including non-genuine product keys,
cracked or tampered code) the system enters a 30-day grace period.
During this time Windows Aero and ReadyBoost features are disabled, and
Windows Defender and Windows Update will have limited capabilities
(optional updates will not be available through Windows Update, and
Windows Defender will only remove critical and severe threats). In
addition, during this grace period, a message will appear repeatedly,
encouraging the user to take the steps necessary to activate with a
genuine product key in order to regain the full value of Windows Vista
and to prevent the system from going into a reduced functionality mode.
3. Reduced Functionality: After the repeated prompts above, and if
Windows Vista is not activated in the 30-day grace period, the system
will operate in a reduced functionality state until a genuine product
key is used for activation. In this reduced state, the user will have
access to their files and applications, and access to the Internet.
However, the desktop will be simplified with only a browser (no Start
Menu or Task Bar) and Windows Vista usage will be limited to one hour
sessions, at which time the user is forced to log off. Additionally,
users may boot the system in Safe Mode in order to access or back-up
personal data and applications.

I encourage you to communicate early with customers about the
activation changes. For customers that experience reduced
functionality, you can help them resolve this by providing them
information about how to activate their Windows Vista properly or
enable them to purchase a genuine copy.

Learn more to help you discuss this with your customers.

If you serve customers in multiple ways, you may receive a similar
communication from the Microsoft OEM team about these new anti-piracy
changes. Together, we are working to deliver a great Windows Vista
experience for you and for our customers.

Thank you for your business,

Allison Watson
Corporate Vice President
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group

 

[Guest]

how do you solve this problem>? i installed home premium all was good
activated just fine. my motherboard went bad. i had hp replace motherboard
and when i got pupter fixed i re-intallled vista. it would not accept the
original product key. i called microsoft and they gave me a new product key
it activated just fine. now 2 weeks later i get this error message. that
this is not a original copy of windows. areo is now shut down. i call
microsoft get put on hold and get disconnected. now i have to wait for 2 days
to call them back. i cant put in original key aswont accept and the key they
gave me it now says its activated but when i enter it for support purposes it
says its a invalid key! what do i do?

 

[Chad Harris]

Hi Krl148--

I don't see in your message whether you know for sure if your VHP is
genuine. What's the source of your VHP--since you installed it you got a
DVD from somewhere I assume unless there is now downloadable Vista from a
MSFT site--I heard there would be but have not kept up with that?

Either you're getting the error message in error or you're getting it
because your VHP isn't genuine. Normally when you called MSFT they would
have verified your DVD Part Number before generating the new PK for you.

Bottom Line is if it's genuine-call 'em right back and let them make this
well. I don't understand the two day wait to call 'em back--I've been able
to get a PK gen 24X7 from their support if I needed it. Give that a shot if
you read this before normal hours.

Obviously whatever they gave you to use to activate is not working if it's
genuine VHP on the box.

Good luck,

CH

I'd like to extend a prodigious shout out to former Asst. Sec of State
Randall Tobias under (lol or maybe over) Condi Rice. My Tobias does the
Bushy camp proud by being a quintissential Bushy Rep. His CV included CEO
at Eli Lily Pharmaceutical headquatered in straight laced Indianapolis--home
of TA'd Rep Pence and the setting for TV's "Close to Home" which is abundant
with TAs and he was CEO of AT&T International. His job until he resigned
late Friday to avoid the news dump was to be Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice's point man in an ambitious effort to overhaul how the U.S. government
manages foreign aid and his official title was Director of U.S. Foreign
Assistance and U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator and
Assistant Sec of State.

A DC Madam indicted federally for rackateering is usuing an unusual defense
of posting her clients on her web site putting more of her list on the web
as time passes. She employed around 120 ladies who were "college educated"
and has a 10,000 15,000 client list of some of the beltway's finest citizens
and family values pushers Bushey style from 2002-2006. For about $300, she
promised 90 minutes of what she has described as a discreet “legal high-end
erotic fantasy service.†But the discreet part is over, after federal
authorities charged her with operating a prostitution ring.

The hypocrisy is prototypical Bushey. Mr. Tobias, who was the director of
foreign assistance and the administrator of the Agency for International
Development, ran agencies that required foreign recipients of AIDS
assistance to explicitly condemn prostitution, a policy that drew protests
from some nations and relief organizations.

The medical problem with this, and I hate to drag science into the world of
the Busheys who hate and don't understand science but prefer witchcraft over
medicine, is that a population who needs HIV education and sometimes
treatment are those that Mr. Tobias would have exclueded espousing what the
world now knows is his personal moral hypocrisy shared with the Family Value
Busheys. Condi Rice is paid the big bucks to administer these programs, and
this only reveals her consummate stupidity and cruelty trying to restrict
HIV care to those who need it the most.

April 29, 2007
Woman in Escort Case Plans to Name Names in Defense
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/us/29escort.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Rice Deputy Quits After Query Over Escort Service
Randall Tobias Oversaw U.S. Foreign Aid Programs
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/27/AR2007042702497_pf.html


Frank Rich ALL THE PRESIDENT'S PRESS

Sunday, May 29, 2007 NY TIMES

SOMEHOW it’s hard to imagine David Halberstam yukking it up with Alberto
Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and two discarded “American Idol†contestants at
the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Before there was
a Woodward and Bernstein, there was Halberstam, still not yet 30 in the
early 1960s, calling those in power to account for lying about our
“progress†in Vietnam. He did so even though J.F.K. told the publisher of
The Times, “I wish like hell that you’d get Halberstam out of there.†He did
so despite public ridicule from the dean of that era’s Georgetown
punditocracy, the now forgotten columnist (and Vietnam War cheerleader)
Joseph Alsop.



It was Alsop’s spirit, not Halberstam’s, that could be seen in C-Span’s live
broadcast of the correspondents’ dinner last Saturday, two days before
Halberstam’s death in a car crash in California. This fete is a
crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era: it illustrates
how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news
media in its shows. Such is literally the case at the annual dinner, where
journalists serve as a supporting cast, but it has been figuratively true
year-round. The press has enabled stunts from the manufactured threat of
imminent “mushroom clouds†to “Saving Private Lynch†to “Mission
Accomplished,†whose fourth anniversary arrives on Tuesday. For all the
recrimination, self-flagellation and reforms that followed these
journalistic failures, it’s far from clear that the entire profession yet
understands why it has lost the public’s faith.


That state of denial was center stage at the correspondents’ dinner last
year, when the invited entertainer, Stephen Colbert, “fell flat,†as The
Washington Post summed up the local consensus. To the astonishment of those
in attendance, a funny thing happened outside the Beltway the morning after:
the video of Mr. Colbert’s performance became a national sensation. (Last
week it was still No. 2 among audiobook downloads on iTunes.) Washington
wisdom had it that Mr. Colbert bombed because he was rude to the president.
His real sin was to be rude to the capital press corps, whom he caricatured
as stenographers. Though most of the Washington audience failed to find the
joke funny, Americans elsewhere, having paid a heavy price for the press’s
failure to challenge White House propaganda about Iraq, laughed until it
hurt.


You’d think that l’affaire Colbert would have led to a little
circumspection, but last Saturday’s dinner was another humiliation. And not
just because this year’s entertainer, an apolitical nightclub has-been (Rich
Little), was a ludicrously tone-deaf flop. More appalling — and symptomatic
of the larger sycophancy — was the press’s insidious role in President Bush’s
star turn at the event.



It’s the practice on these occasions that the president do his own comic
shtick, but this year Mr. Bush made a grand show of abstaining, saying that
the killings at Virginia Tech precluded his being a “funny guy.†Any
civilian watching on TV could formulate the question left hanging by this
pronouncement: Why did the killings in Iraq not preclude his being a “funny
guy†at other press banquets we’ve watched on C-Span? At the equivalent
Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association gala three years ago, the
president contributed an elaborate (and tasteless) comic sketch about his
failed search for Saddam’s W.M.D.


But the revelers in the ballroom last Saturday could not raise that
discrepancy and challenge Mr. Bush’s hypocrisy; they could only clap. And so
they served as captive dress extras in a propaganda stunt, lending their
credibility to the president’s sanctimonious exploitation of the Virginia
Tech tragedy for his own political self-aggrandizement on national
television. Meanwhile the war was kept as tightly under wraps as the troops’
coffins.


By coincidence, this year’s dinner occurred just before a Congressional
hearing filled in some new blanks in the still incomplete story of a more
egregious White House propaganda extravaganza: the Pat Tillman hoax. As it
turns out, the correspondents’ dinner played an embarrassing cameo role in
it, too.


What the hearing underscored was the likelihood that the White House also
knew very early on what the Army knew and covered up: the football star’s
supposed death in battle in Afghanistan, vividly described in a Pentagon
press release awarding him a Silver Star, was a complete fabrication, told
to the world (and Tillman’s parents) even though top officers already
suspected he had died by friendly fire. The White House apparently decided
to join the Pentagon in maintaining that lie so that it could be milked for
P.R. purposes on two television shows, the correspondents’ dinner on May 1,
2004, and a memorial service for Tillman two days later.



The timeline of events in the week or so leading up to that dinner is
startling. Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004. By the next day top
officers knew he had not been killed by enemy fire. On April 29, a top
special operations commander sent a memo to John Abizaid, among other
generals, suggesting that the White House be warned off making specific
public claims about how Tillman died. Simultaneously, according to an e-mail
that surfaced last week, a White House speechwriter contacted the Pentagon
to gather information about Tillman for use at the correspondents’ dinner.


When President Bush spoke at the dinner at week’s end, he followed his jokes
with a eulogy about Tillman’s sacrifice. But he kept the circumstances of
Tillman’s death vague, no doubt because the White House did indeed get the
message that the Pentagon’s press release about Tillman’s losing his life in
battle was fiction. Yet it would be four more weeks before Pat Tillman’s own
family was let in on the truth.


To see why the administration wanted to keep the myth going, just look at
other events happening in the week before that correspondents’ dinner. On
April 28, 2004, CBS broadcast the first photographs from Abu Ghraib; on
April 29 a poll on The Times’s front page found the president’s approval
rating on the war was plummeting; on April 30 Ted Koppel challenged the
administration’s efforts to keep the war dead hidden by reading the names of
the fallen on “Nightline.†Tillman could be useful to help drown out all
this bad news, and to an extent he was. The Washington press corps that
applauded the president at the correspondents’ dinner is the same press
corps that was slow to recognize the importance of Abu Ghraib that weekend
and, as documented by a new study, “When the Press Fails†(University of
Chicago Press), even slower to label the crimes as torture.



In his PBS report last week about the journalism breakdown before the war,
Bill Moyers said that “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in
enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false pretenses.†That’s
not universally true; a number of news organizations have owned up to their
disasters and tried to learn from them. Yet old habits die hard: for too
long the full weight of the scandal in the Gonzales Justice Department
eluded some of the Washington media pack, just as Abu Ghraib and the C.I.A.
leak case did.


After last weekend’s correspondents’ dinner, The Times decided to end its
participation in such events. But even were the dinner to vanish altogether,
it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall syndrome. The
current White House, weakened as it is, can still establish story lines as
fake as “Mission Accomplished†and get a free pass.


To pick just one overarching example: much of the press still takes it as a
given that Iraq has a functioning government that might meet political
benchmarks (oil law, de-Baathification reform, etc., etc.) that would
facilitate an American withdrawal. In reality, the Maliki “government†can’t
meet any benchmarks, even if they were enforced, because that government
exists only as a fictional White House talking point. As Gen. Barry
McCaffrey said last week, this government doesn’t fully control a single
province. Its Parliament, now approaching a scheduled summer recess, has
passed no major legislation in months. Iraq’s sole recent democratic
achievement is to ban the release of civilian casualty figures, lest they
challenge White House happy talk about “progress†in Iraq.


It’s our country’s bitter fortune that while David Halberstam is gone, too
many Joe Alsops still hold sway. Take the current dean of the Washington
press corps, David Broder, who is leading the charge in ridiculing Harry
Reid for saying the obvious — that “this war is lost†(as it is militarily,
unless we stay in perpetuity and draft many more troops). In February, Mr.
Broder handed down another gem of Beltway conventional wisdom, suggesting
that “at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his
policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback.â€



Some may recall that Stephen Colbert offered the same prediction in his
monologue at the correspondents’ dinner a year ago. “I don’t believe this is
a low point in this presidency,†he said. “I believe it is just a lull
before a comeback.†But the fake pundit, unlike the real one, recognized
that this was a joke.

 

[Selee]

Conor,

Evidently Microsoft partner HP was never made aware of the information you
presented. I purchased a new Compac Presario with Vista Home Basic
installed. When I received the computer the paper work with it said, start
up and enjoy the experience. This weekend, I started getting messages that
my copy of Vista was not a legal installation and I should either operate
with a reduced functioned program, enter another product key or contact HP
for assistance.

I contacted HP for assistance. Here is their support answer! You will need
to reload the operating system! Huh?
I buy a new computer with the new operating system installed and they want
me to reinstall? I wasn't buying that and after a while I found a Microsoft
support number which I called and finally got the system validated.

HP offered no backup disks for the operating system. The Microsoft Genuine
tag was helpfully put on the bottom of the computer where, unless you are a
contortionist, you can't read and type at the same time. Plus HP offered no
setup information that you would have to validate the installation yourself.

A copy of the information you posted would have saved me all the trouble!

 

[Guest]

i got a run around from microsoft for 4 days then they tell me i have to
get new product key from hp. i get ahold of hp and they tell me that
microsoft has to give it to me so now im screwed i got the cds from the hp
express upgrade program all was fine until i had to get new motherboard
installed in which a hp tec replaced so i screwed right neither microsoft or
hp will help

 

[Chad Harris]

That's not right. Whomever supplied the original CD either OEM or MSFt (not
clear here but I believe HP) is responsible for giving you a key that works.
You are getting a collossal runaround and I'd go to whoever sold you that OS
and demand a valid key. I also don't understand why a pre-loaded OS isn't
running. I do understand that MSFT forces companies not to provide you an
OS DVD with the panopoly of recovery tools they brag about and that none of
their setup engineers has moved a muscle to stand up to this abuse of
customers nor has Newsgroup Liason Jill Zoeller from MSFT moved a muscle to
correct that problem.

CH

 

[Guest]

i tried to use hp recovery cd's hp sent me followed there directions . it
reads cd then het error and vista reboost and loads. hp said they cant give
new key because they buy them from microsoft and microsoft says the oem has
to give it to me so guess what im screwed i even talked to sups. from both co.