Welcome to the third part in my Things to check before switching to Vista series. The last two articles dealt with possible hardware and software incompatibilities and ways to check whether your hard- and software would run in Windows Vista. It is imminent to check this before you make the switch. Just imagine that you make the switch and a program that you run on a daily basis will not install or run properly.

Categories: Knowledge, Operating Systems, Windows

According to the website apcmag “pirates” were able to crack the vista activation server. As you all know every Windows Vista edition has to be activated, even the enterprise editions which was not the case in Windows XP. Imagine a company with thousands of computers all running Windows Vista. It would probably take some time to activate each on its own. The clever folks at Microsoft wanted to make it more comfortable for their business clients and created the so called Key Management Service.

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

It seems that Microsoft added the upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 to the automatic upgrade feature of Windows XP. Automatic Updates will notify the user that a new version is ready for download giving the user the option to Install, Don’t Install and Ask Me Later. It seems a pressing matter to Microsoft to get a large basis of Internet Explorer 7 users in a hurry to regain lost grounds in the waging browser war against Opera and Firefox.

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

Windows Media Player 11 for XP has been released and Microsoft decided to add a WGA check to the installation routine. Once you double-click the executable that you downloaded the tool asks for a WGA check and will not continue the installation until it was checked whether Microsoft thinks your Windows installation is legit or not. We heard about users that had problems with those WGA checks and could not install software that performed checks although they had a legit system.

Categories: Hacking, Operating Systems, Windows

When you want to download a file from Microsoft a WGA (windows genuine advantage) check is performed. Microsoft installs a small piece of software on your computer that contacts the Microsoft server and checks for validity. If the test fails you will not be able to download the file(s). The following method gives you the ability to download every file from Microsoft without a WGA check.

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

RemoveWga has been released in a new version today and I thought it would be a nice idea to post a quick article and download link about this nice anti wga tool. RemoveWga enables you to remove the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications which sends data to Microsoft regulary. The question is why would the wga [...]

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

You all know windows genuine advantage (wga) which checks if you are running a legit copy of windows xp on every startup and when you try to download certain tools and updates from the microsoft website. Microsoft confirmed that only 80% of all WGA failures are caused by pirated keys which means that about 20% are not caused by pirated keys.

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

Windows Genuine Advantage Notification is checking if you are running a legit copy of windows on every boot, even though it might have already verified this on the first run. This is an annoying behaviour of WGA Notificiation which can be countered by running this sweet little freeware called Remove WGA.

Categories: Security