WinXP Woes .. Again

[The Mad Professor]

The screaming started early this morning...
first person into the office thumbs the power buttons on the pc's and puts the kettle on for the first brew of the morning, by the time the tea is made all the machines should be booted up and the days labours can commence...

Such was the theory..however
this morning every machine displayed a message from Microsoft telling all that the O/S had failed validation , and oddly enough all the lines to our I.T people were engaged LOL.

Anybody here had similiar problems today ?

 

[Hero999]

Solution:
Replace them with Macs or install Linux on them.

 

[Styx]

yer I did an "emerge --sync && emerge world -uD" and it all work perfectly

god I love Linux and it "just works" aproach

 

[The Mad Professor]

Thata not a bad suggestion lol , believe me a linux distro and a windows emulator package is looking awfull tempting.. I wonder if MS will give a refund?

 

[justDIY]

your computers received the recent windows update "Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool" or some such ... it checks your serial number against the master database... if the same serial number is used more than N times, it's flagged as being "counterfit" ... your IT department will have to call up Microsoft and get a new serial number, for each computer.

I've seen this happen when hard-disk cloning tools are used ... if you have a room full of computers, and duplicate the first computer ten times, you now have eleven systems using the same serial number, even though each system probably has its own, it's not entered... once these clones phone home, microsoft flags the number as counterfit.

 

[Hero999]

"Genuine Advantage" What a joke, genuine advantage to M$, genuine disadvantage/pain in the neck to the consumer.

Is it possible to do a system restore and remove this update?

Perhapps you should consider disabling automatic updates and update once a month, selecting only the updates you want after researching about the ones that aren't required or can be a pain.

 

[justDIY]

no, you cannot uninstall this update ... there are instructions for disabling it, easily found on google ... problem is, once your serial # is flagged, it is permenantly flagged and disabling the notifiction won't help you... when stage two of genuine advantage is in effect, your operating system will no longer receive any windows updates.

 

[john1]

You may not be able to uninstall that update,
but you could probably wipe the units clean,
and re-install without including that update.

I had thought you could download any XP update from microsoft
and keep it on CD if you wanted to.

Maybe you can't.
My 98se still works ok.

John

 

[Hero999]

There must be a registry hack, there always is, just finding it is the problem.

 

[justDIY]

nah, it's much easier than hacking the registry ... for reasons of not wanting to get this board in trouble, it's easier to just get the instructions off google.

pretty much you just need to find some special windows files and fiddle with them a bit.

but, this doesn't solve the problem - your XP cd-key is now marked as "BAD" and you won't be able to download anything from Microsoft in the near future. The only legit way to fix this is to call Microsoft and explain yourself... of course, there are other methods, but I digress.

 

[zevon8]

It's not hard, and people do it legitimately all the time, ie when templating a corporate fleet of laptops. The drives are all cloned, and then legal activation keys are set. You now need to get some legal keys from Microsoft.

Even machines bought from many of the big assemblers are done this way, especially the ones where you get a "recovery disc" and a still sealed version of the operating system. They were mass cloned on a drive array, then had legit keys added in, or you add it in first boot/update.

 

[The Mad Professor]

John1 is indeed correct, updates for XP can be downloaded as stand alone executable files direct from MS without key validation via a third party website.

 

[john1]

Thank you professor,

This is the site i use:
**broken link removed**
It is a Microsoft site.

There may well be others.
I started keeping the patches and updates on CD
when it became apparent that Microsoft were going to withdraw
support for Win98se, even though it has been very successful,
and is still in very widespread use.

It may even be in wider use than XP, although it is difficult to
tell as duplications do not have the problems that they do with XP.
So for every legit 98se, there may be dozens of clones.

If i have to re-install from scratch, i can run in the necessary
updates or patches from CD, without needing to use the internet.

I would be interested to read the opinions of others on this.

Regards, John

 

[The Mad Professor]

Softwarepatch.com continues to be very usefull.