Back in the day, In the "Old Country," Microsoft would trust us to purchase the correct number of licenses we needed. All we needed to do was enter a CD-Key that was located on the CD sleeve during installation.. If we had a key, we must have bought it; Right?
Well, it seems as though Microsoft caught on to us. We were giving the CD's and their keys to friends, family, coworkers and strangers on the street. Some people even went as far as to zip the CD and put it and the key on an FTP site that we could download it from.. So they created this nifty little "activation" process.
The problem with this "activation" process was that IT professionals were not given enough time test new releases with their network, hardware and software. We had 30 days before we needed to activate our copy. Then the software could not be installed to any other machine at any time, unless you called Microsoft and begged them...
Microsoft's answer to this problem was to create their Open License with Windows XP, but all of the "Bad Apple" IT pros started giving these away too...
Here is an article by Joel Hruska which outlines how to extend the activation period for Vista, in some cases, for up to a year.
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2 comments:
Hi Jeff:
Good luck with the site. I am having issues with my XP machines recognizing my Vista machine on my home network. The Vista system sees the XP systems, but I can not acces the files and the XP systems do not see the Vista system at all. Any ideas?
Vista is a very secure operating system. Make sure all your firewall settings are set up to allow connections from internal network IP's... Good Luck and thanks for checking out my site....
TechGuruJeff
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