It should also be noted that the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications Tool is different from the Windows Genuine Advantage Validation tool. The former is only used to exchange data with a Microsoft server while the latter will perform the validation itself.

Remove WGA will only remove the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications Tool if the tool is running on the computer system and only if the user selects so.

The Remove WGA software program scans the computer system and report its findings back to the user. It will tell the user if the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications Tool is active on the computer system. To be precise it will check if wgalogon.dll is loaded into the winlogon.exe process.

Remove WGA will provide the means to remove the Microsoft WGA Notification Tool from the system which will essentially remove wgatray.exe and wgalogon.dll. A click on yes will remove the wga notification tool.

The tool is only available for download on various download portals.

The second is if a WGA check fails which will make Vista run in Non-Genuine Mode. Both modes impose certain penalties upon the user like logging him off after an hour or disabling features like Aero or Readyboost. Adrian posted the changes that users will face if they have Service Pack 1 installed.

The good news is that both modes described above are gone. Users will not be logged off automatically anymore which is great. Microsoft however decided to change tactics and nag the user to death – eh registration / activation – instead. Users will experience the following if their Vista installation fails the WGA check or if they fail to activate Vista in time.

A nag screen to activate at logon that cannot be dismissed for 15 seconds.
Every hour the desktop background is switched to black (it can be changed back, but after an hour it’s set to black again).
Activation dialogs and balloon dialogs appear regularly.
Optional Windows Updates aren’t delivered.

Users who purchase Microsoft Windows have to activate and update it. Users who download it from P2P get it activated and with the latest updates installed. What’s wrong with this picture ? Oh yes, the first batch of users who actually paid for the product are having a less comfortable version.

They have to activate the system and will have to do it again if they change important hardware in the system. They have to use Windows Updates to update their system after the purchase as well.

Their reasoning is that they removed the WGA validation to ‘protect the entire Windows ecosystem’. We all know that Microsoft started to integrate Internet Explorer heavily into the system to dominate the thriving Netscape browser which turned out to be a successful marketing decision.

I personally think it is about market share and the hopes that Internet Explorer 7 is able to get most of the Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade to it.

Microsoft enabled the Toolbar in Internet Explorer 7 by default which is in my opinion a good move. Many users got confused by the new looks of the browser.

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via PC Doctor

Great news for customers who wasted precious time selecting and buying videos only to find out that their purchased videos will stop working soon. It is even more important that it was not a small company who had to shutdown their service but a billion dollar company.

This in turn means that it could happen to anyone who purchases products – media normally such as music or videos – that have some sort of DRM integrated in the data.

We already see a shift away from DRM towards watermarked media files which is definitely a step in the right direction. Better of course does not mean perfect but it is heading towards a good direction.

The other occurence that involved some sort of DRM was when Microsofts WGA servers went down flagging all genuine Windows Vista installations as invalid if a WGA check was performed on those systems.

So, updating your system had the result that your formerly validated Windows Vista was flagged as not validated which meant that the updates could not be installed.

Microsoft was able to fix the issue after two days and users are again able to validate their system to be able to download updates for it. Some users claim that Windows Update is not working anymore after re-validating their system which can only be attributed to this process.

The bottom line is this: It is not safe to say that you will be allowed to keep data that you purchased. It can happen that you will lose that data without being able to interfere at all. Would you buy a car, a CD or DVD if someone told you that it could happen that you would not be able to play them in the future if the producer decided to stop distributing them ?

I know that it is quite comfortable to download music and videos from the Internet but I personally think that it is not worth it at all. You will lose what you bought in the long run, that is my prediction.

Even if you purchase a product that uses DRM, WGA (replace with other acronyms that will surely replace these in the future)

After installing the game and playing for a while a message from Windows Vista popped up minimzing the game in the course of action. The message that appeared told her that her copy of Windows Vista was not genuine. She tried to reactivate the operating system but it would fail although she would supply the correct key that was accepted before.

After uninstalling the 9 Dragons game the activation was again accepted and Windows Vista was activated again.

If this story really holds true it is a remarkable one. Why on earth would Windows Vista revoke the activation – this would be the main questions that would have to be answered.

This pretty looks like a way for Microsoft to revoke the activation on systems that run known pirated keys or install software that would probably try to interfere with Windows Vista core processes.

Fortunately for him there is indeed an easy method to upgrade Windows XP without contacting a Microsoft server at all. This of course is only half the truth, some software products like IE7 and Windows Media Player 11 contact Microsoft during installation. You can either use one of the techniques described in my posts to avoid this or choose to not install those programs.

The current Autopatcher file size is about 350 megabytes in size for Windows XP and can be downloaded from the Autopatcher homepage. I suggest you use a torrent or a mirror to ease the load on the main servers. You also find versions for Windows 2000 and 2003.

Download the full Autopatcher release for your language and after that the smaller update for January. Install both on your computer and run the application afterwards. The difference between full and lite versions is that some third party products (e.g. Java from Sun) have been removed from the package, all Microsoft patches are still inside.

Autopatcher scans your system and displays a list of patches that could be installed. The following categories exist:

1. Microsoft Windows – Critital Updates
2. Microsoft Windows – Recommended Updates
3. Microsoft Windows – Updated Components
4. Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage
5. Windows Addons
6. Registry Tweaks

The first three are automatically (partially) selected. I would advise to check the patches manually and remove everything that seems unnecessary. Click on Update after you have made your selections and Autopatcher will update your system.

Autopatcher is great if you have to update more than one operating system. Instead of downloading all the patches several times you do it once. Great time saver.

It was always known that there would be false positives and the new figures give us a clearer picture on the scale of the false positive rate. About 114 million systems failed the WGA check since the introduction of those checks and Microsoft admitted that 1% of those were false positives meaning that legit Windows systems failed the WGA check.

While under 1% does not seem that much it it does look much in absolute figures: 1% of 114 million checks means that 1.14 million systems failed the check although this should not have happened. I can’t figure out how the source comes to the conclusion that the absolute number would be 5 million false positives because you clearly have to use the failed checks for the figure and not the total amount of checks which is 500 million.

It is nevertheless a huge number and Microsoft should do everything to reduce it by optimizing the script that performs the checks.

Today we are going to take a look at a function of Vista that most people could live without: WGA. You do know that XP introduced WGA which stands for Windows Genuine Advantage. You can still run XP without problems even if the WGA check should fail. A nagscreen is the only thing that appears afterwards and it is no problem to disable it. Vista will introduce a new level. If the WGA check fails Vista will reduce the functionality.

Vista will only run in Reduced Function Mode and many features will not be available anymore:

By choosing Access your computer with reduced functionality, the default Web browser will be started and the user will be presented with an option to purchase a new product key. There is no start menu, no desktop icons, and the desktop background is changed to black. The Web browser will fully function and Internet connectivity will not be blocked. After one hour, the system will log the user out without warning. It will not shut down the machine, and the user can log back in. Note: This is different from the Windows XP RFM experience, which limits screen resolution, colors, sounds and other features.

A crippled system which should not be that of a problem if only pirated copies of Vista were affected. We all know that this will not be the case. We all read about legit copies of XP who failed WGA checks with no one being able to fix this problem. It is most likely that at least some legit copies of Vista will be affected by this phenomenon as well.

The new WGA could indeed do something good for the growth of free operating systems like Linux. The question that you have to ask yourself if you face such a situation: Do I want to buy Vista for hundreds of dollars or do I want to try a free operating system instead and save the money ? Some will buy Vista because they want to play the latest games but all the others, who are not that interested in games but working with their pc – will they buy Vista ? I doubt so.

A great opportunity for Linux.

The KMS works as a activation hub for all computers connected to it which means that all Vista editions can be activated at once using the server. To counter abuse the activation is only valid for 180 days and everything needs to be re-activated in that period. The software, scheduled for release next year, apparently got into wrong hands and “pirates” were able to tweak the Key Management Service that way that it would activate the Vista edition without connecting to the Microsoft Activation server at all.

Everything a Pirate needs is now available freely, though illegally, on the internet. You may download a full retail version of Windows Vista with some CD keys and you may download the Key Management Service to activate the edition without Microsoft ever knowing.

This will only work with Business and Enterprise editions and the time limit is still active. I personally think that it is only a matter of time until those nasty “pirates” create a version that activates Vista completely. Another drawback is that you will still be subject to WGA checks if you use services such as Windows Update to update your operating system. Again, only a matter of time for this as well.

Will Vista be less copied than XP ? I don’t think so. Sure activation and WGA could make this happen but it seems that the “pirates” are on step ahead, again.

Many users that use Firefox or Opera do not care about the new Internet Explorer 7 – which means they probably want to get rid of this message altogether. Blocking windows update from automatic updating to IE7 can be done by changing one registry key in the registry. All you need to do is create a new registry file and import it to the registry

Create a new textfile, paste the following lines of code into it and save it with the extension .reg

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\7.0]
"DoNotAllowIE70"=dword:00000001

This creates a new registry key that blocks the automatic update to IE7, you will not see the annoying windows that popups again. Simply change the registry key from 1 to 0 if you want to see the window again to update to the new IE7.

The method that was described below is no longer working and has therefor been removed from this server.

- Now uses the “RunOnce” registry entry instead of “Run” (starts sooner)
- Added a clean removal procedure for the final WGA notification update
(The final WGA notification is now removed cleanly without any BSOD)
- If every removal procedure fails (possibly for futur WGA versions), offers the brutal removal procedure

RemoveWGA only disables the notification part of Windows Genuine Advantage, it does not touch the validation part. No downloads need the notification part as of now, they only check the validation part.

Please read “Preventing the prompt to reinstall WGA notification update” if you want to prevent that windows urges you to update the nofitication part of wga again.

I think this is pretty interesting. Ed Bott from Zdnet tried to get an answer about the other 20% and recieved an evasive one stating that Microsoft would not be able to share specifics and that those mostly resulted from “activities such as various forms of tampering and unauthorized OEM installations.” The only conclusion that I can come up with is that there is most likely a large number of false positives and Microsoft does it´s best to keep this number secret.

Remove WGA gives you information if WGA Notification is running on your system and allows you to disable the wga tool from your system. It is also able to run silently on your system and become active when the WGA Notificiation becomes active on your system as well.