William Gustafson said:
There were a number of updates that installed last Tuesday. Due to some
problems with a program I am testing I have had to do a number of system
restores. After each restore the updates are re-installed and each time
that happens I am notified that "in order to do the installs we had to
turn off you activation, please activate again, you have three days".
What is this all about and am I eventually going to have to be calling
each time this happens?
My friend had the same type of issue himself, his hard drive started giving
warning signs of impending failure and he tried to backup and restore it to
a new drive and it would not boot and he had to do a bunch of edits to get
it to boot because Microsoft does not allow complete backups of the drive,
but excludes certain vital boot files, and boot info, and when he finally
got it to boot it said Vista, Microsoft Flight Simulator (Microsoft flight
simulator said it was an illegal copy) had to be reactivated because it was
on a different computer when in fact it was on the same computer, it was
just a drive replacement to save many hours of having to reinstall
everything.
He called Microsoft and the support person said he could not have Vista on
two drives at the same time and he explained that one of the drives was
about to go bad, and so that drive was not in use and to be destroyed and
that it was the same machine.
The tech support person said if anything on the computer was added or
replaced, Vista and Microsoft flight simulator is de-activated and he has to
call Microsoft to re-activate.
I gave him a DVD drive to replace his flakey one and he rebooted and I saw
the "You must reactivate windows".
The tech support person had such a poor pronunciation of numbers that he
went around and around trying to figure out whether "Far" was four or five.
He is upgrading his monitor he ordered and the support person said he would
have to reactivate again.
So it seems to be true, that you can't backup Vista, you can't replace
anything on the computer without having to call Microsoft and be given the
fifth degree, or being asked in an accusatory manner why you are
re-activating.so many times.
So anyone who replaces anything, or buys hardware, is treated with suspicion
as if they were a criminal. I was on the phone myself talking to the support
person explaining that the only thing we did was replace a bad DVD Drive.
I have seen these things and I wonder what is the big deal, because he
surely isnt' the only person in the world that buys new or upgrade hardware
for one computer.
There is something terribly wrong with this picture, because I should be
seeing a LOT of people suffering this way.
He isn't even testing some special program besides.
