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Options for 'Fixing' A Pirated Copy of Windows
PunkOfLinux writes "My parents are running a pirated copy of windows that my mom received from a teacher at school. My parents want to go legit, and buy a copy of Windows, but they are afraid of deleting everything and having to reinstall all their programs. Seeing as I know you guys will have an answer, I'm going to ask you: What would you do in this situation?"
Are they losing sleep at night feeling like they're taking food out of the mouths of those in Redmond? Do they think their system will run better? Perhaps they feel it's a sin because technically it's stealing? My advice... don't even bother with it. Buy Vista if and when it's released or wait until you get a new computer.
This is about the first sensible comment here. The bigger problem than using the pirated Windows is that apparently they don't have reliable (any?) backups. What are they going to do when the HD suddenly craps out? Once you've prepared for that (i.e., good backups!) your stated problem (fear of reinstalling) becomes moot.
OEM copies can be sold with things like computer mice or ethernet cards
Judging from Microsoft's 'System Builder' documentation, I don't think you even need to bother doing that. Buying and installing an OEM version of Windows onto your PC is perfectly fine and legal. But by doing so, you've now created a 'new PC' in Microsoft's eyes and so you no longer have access to any support from them, as support for OEM software is to be obtained from your system builder (namely, you, in this case). So you're legal but completely on your own. At least this is the way I read it.
from what I understand you are saying -
your parents have a copy of windows they know is pirated, but now want to go legit. they want to do so without having to clear their PC and lose all the settings/etc. they've accumulated over the years with all the installed programs and so forth.
leaving aside whether clearing everything may be a good idea anyway (accumulated cruft, malware etc.) - what do you mean, about not having to reinstall software? are we talking *legit* software? it seems a bit strange to have pirated windows, but legit applications (particularly if the application would have cost a lot more than the windows licence). if the intended path is to get the windows legit, but you've still got heaps of pirated applications, then you've got more problems than you realise you do. unless, of course, it's a calculated gamble that you are more likely to be hit by enforcemeny from MS, than by the various other application vendors.
i think what you need to do is to write down the cost of "properly going legit" - all the applications you want to use, etc., total it up, and decide if you have that kind of money. and then decide if you are prepared to go into a completely free environment - any one of the linux distros.
although it IS "free as in freedom", as a practical matter, free as in beer makes a big difference too, potentially even more. you'd have to go through hassle and pain learning a new setup, and the features may well be worse off etc. for particular applications (GIMP != Photoshop, but seriously, if you can afford the price of photoshop you're not in the common group). but some times that's what it means to go legit. I mean, I look at the price tags of a lot of things that I want, and then I realise, "shit, i'm poor". but, you know, this is how the capitalist system works. and then maybe you can think a bit more about, what does it really mean to have a system where the cost of producing something is X, but the price of it may be X + "arbitrary number determined for profit maximisation", vs what could be determined as a "fair price".
No, but I find it interesting that the US Fish and Wildlife Service has a Windows XP key uploaded in plain text onto a freely accessible ftp server. The government supports piracy!
As an individual, how much less on your own are you if you have a retail version?
I do think one should buy the software one uses (I know I do), but I don't expect
any personal support from Microsoft; I'm already glad if they fix known (security)
bugs in a decent time frame.
The directory containing that file also has an Office 2003 key :-)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Not certain, and definitely not equating to profits, which are down.
Wii is the one to watch.
Total bullshit. What's happened was predicted a decade ago. Microsoft has already picked all the "low-hanging fruit", and now needs more bodies to squeeze more revenue out of marginal products.
The current prediction is a flat stock value, because of the buyback. Its been estimated that without the buyback, the stock would have lost about 20%. This buyback is confverting an asset with actual value (cash) into an asset with no intrinsic value(stock). But it was either do the buyback or lose even more, as the assets that are held as stock would have lost even more value.
No its not, and it won't be within the foreseable future. http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/28/HNwinsuc cessor_1.html They haven't even got a clue as to where they want it to go, except for some vague mumblings about "better multiprocessor support".
Heck, even a year after they "deliver" Vista, they still won't have delivered what was slated to go into it originally under the name "blackcomb".
Nope. They're in a bind on Office pricing. Lower the price, cannibalize revenues from existing customers. Maintain the price, lose existing customers. Besides, there are no "must haves" for the vast majority of users in the current version, never mind a hypothetical future upgrade. Their only option at this point is to continue to bleed slowly.
Same problem as #6 above. They simply can't afford to lower the price - it will mean less $$$, without increasing sales. That's the problem with being a near-monopoly - you're your own worst competitor. Even Microsofts' own employees are saying there's no real reason to upgrade.
And yet they've doubled their laptop sales, then doubled them again. They're now 12% of all laptops sold. Microsoft is going to miss the "back-to-school" surge next month, so expect to see mac laptops rise to between 15 and 20% by year-end, as Microsoft also misses the pre-Christmas sales. Expect desktops to follow, as users begin to demand seamless compatibility between their mac laptops and their home desktops.
IE is bleeding market share every month. The people who have changed will never go back, because the trust is gone. Microsoft has actually already lost the browser wars - its just taking tie for the news to spread from the head (early adopters) to the rest of the body.
People don't care any more. They don't buy an OS for its features - they just want to use it to do their work, play games, surf the net, etc. Windows95 was the last "gee whiz" release. Those days are gone. They'll never be back. Even the features that wer yanked from vista are not "must-haves" any more - and there will be free 3rd-party replacements for anyone who doesn't wan
But in situations like this, I think there's a lot to be said for a format & reinstall. Don't get me wrong - I think this can be a massive cop-out on many occasions, and I believe that lots of people do it too easily because it's easier than analysing and learning about a problem - but in a situation where I'm not sure how Windows will behave (am I sure that Pro will repair the particular pirate version of XP that they have?) then format-and-reinstall is a very proven solution.
On a system that's otherwise working fine, and has been for some time, then I'd rather spend an hour or 90 minutes removing malware or a virus, or fixing an "inexplicable" browser problem than doing a format-and-reinstall. But when I have to do a format-and-reinstall then it's a VERY straight-forward process - I back up everything on the hard-drive with a knoppix CD to my portable drive, copy the back-up to another machine, dd the drive with a few zeros so that the Windows install starts on a blank sheet, and let it get on with things. I charge this at three hours of my time, but I'd guess that I probably only spend two or two-and-a-half actually sitting at or waiting on the machine because I base this fixed price on being able to take it away and leave it running in the corner of my study for a couple of days. Thus the customer gets a "brand new" machine with all a fresh operating system, all the Windows updates, I reinstall any software disks they give me, drag & drop My Documents back into place (and explain how to search the "Old Stuff" folder I've copied back to their hard-drive from my portable disk), reimport their address book & emails; when I take the machine back I check their printer and broadband works and the customer is usually like "Wow! It's never been this fast before!!"
I'll say again that this isn't always the best way to resolve problems, but many users don't have innumerable programs installed on their machine, nor such a customised desktop or set of preferences that it'll take them long to get things back to a way they're comfortable with. Often there is so much crap installed by the OEM at the factory that users have never experienced a truly fresh install of XP before!!
Ned.
Wireless network cards - GUARANTEED 100% Linux Compatible!
Actually, I really do know what I'm talking about. The theory is simple: all malware has to get launched. There are a limited number of places in windows something can stick itself to get launched at boot time. This is what tools like HijackThis and autoruns allow you to look at. If you use them frequently enough, it's pretty easy to pick out what doesn't below.
Kernel rootkits made this a bit more challenging, since you can't trust what Windows is telling you about what you see through these tools. The answer to that is to boot to trusted media (like a BartPE disk) and check out the potential autostart locations from that. Since the malware isn't loaded, it can't make the system lie to you.
Thanks to the newer kernel rootkits that hide files in NTFS alternate data streams, you have to scan for those as well from trusted media. But that's doable- there are tools which work from BartPE which will enumate files with ADS streams, and you can also check for ADS paths in the list of drivers which load a boot-time. Then when you think you've got it clean, throw a sniffer on the machine's LAN connection and see if anything unexpected happens.
Thus, it's really quite possible to manually discover and "kill" most infections with a reasonably high degree of confidence, if you have enough practice and experience. The level of assurance isn't high enough for a corporate server, but it's usually sufficient for home users and in small businesses, considering the cost of a from-scratch rebuild.
I do admit I'm a bit more qualified than most techs who do this... I've got a computer science degree, and have been doing IT stuff professionally for 14 years. You've got to have a pretty solid grasp of windows internals to do this well.
-R
Sorry, typo: that should obviously have read "such a system could never work without Big Brother-scale surveillance of any use of copyright materials".
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.