MS Product Activation for Windows (licensing)

[Bill Stewart]

>>No more casual copying?
>>The most potentially controversial addition to Whistler 2410, however,
>>is anti-piracy code that Microsoft is calling "Microsoft Product
>>Activation for Windows," 

Copy protection is annoying when you have only one machine.
It's much more annoying in the commercially interesting case,
which is when you have many machines and are
copying things legitimately.

I've got a lab with half a dozen year-old El Cheapo PCs
and half a dozen Genuine Antique AT&T Pentium 90s.
Then there's the stack of old-beater laptops,
which are very nice machines to put in a rack of routers
when you just want a Ping/FTP/Web target.

The El Cheapo PCs each came with a licensed Win98;
I've got the disks in a stack, and keeping track of which 
CD goes with which PC would be a serious annoyance.
It's actually worse, because the PCs are pieces of junk
that need to be have major chunks of Windows reloaded
every once in a while, though at least Win98 has less of the
"you have moved your mouse, please put in the Windows CD and reboot"
that Win95 had.  It's annoying enough to keep track of
which Win98 serial numbers go with which CDROMs -
writing the number on the CDROM helps, but you can't
read it when it's in the drive :-)

The P90s were covered by a site license; I never had
individual media for them (and most of them don't have CD players,
which makes the "Please put the Win95 CD in the drive" more annoying.)
The copy of Win95 I've got on CDROM was from somewhere else.
Many of them are happily running Linux now.  
N of them hang out on a DSL connection for doing firewall testing,
and they're named "Kenny" because they're targets for kiddies,
and it's nice not to mess with copy protection when I
reload the OS.

Some of the laptops still have their CDROMs; some don't,
and the ones that do often have funky drivers.
That's why they're still running Windows....
at least they don't crash very often, though you still
have to reboot them if you change static IP addresses.

And I paid cash money to upgrade the home machine to 
Win98 Second Edition specifically to get 
Internet Connection Service, which didn't work as promised
and trashed the DLLs used by several other commercial products
in ways that uninstalling didn't fix.
Will I feel guilty if I install WinME on two or three boxes?
(Skeptical, yes, but guilty?  No.)



				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
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