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A Different Kind of WGA 'Problem'
Ed Bott recently attempted to scout out the problems reported in so many horror stories floating around the net relating to Microsoft's WGA. He did experience problems, however, not the ones that you might expect. He intentionally installed a pirated copy of Windows XP to see how the process worked but was unable to get WGA to recognize his computer as pirated. From the article: "I'm reluctantly running a pirated version of Windows and can't get caught no matter how hard I try. But these same people want us to believe that the WGA software they've developed is nearly foolproof. They claim that all but "a fraction of a percent" of those 60 million people who've been denied access to Microsoft updates and downloads are guilty, guilty, guilty. Right."
No moron, thier not lazy, there using a VLK.
So the key that he's using hasn't hit Microsoft's ban list yet. There could be a number of simple reasons for this as others have pointed out.
:)
None of this has anything to do with legitimate license keys being rejected, which is a completely different problem with the same system. Just because a specific pirated copy of XP passes WGA does not mean that it's likely for legitimate copies of XP to be rejected by WGA.
The nice thing about both of these problems is that they can be fairly easily resolved with a single phone call
PS, I didn't RTFA, I'm simply responding to the last line of the quoted text. If there is some reason that this guy's experience has any direct relationship to legitimate copies of XP being flagged as pirated, please correct me.
PS2, I'm no fan of WGA. When I saw it come up in automatic updates on my XP box, I unchecked it. It continues to appear now and then, and often the system doesn't tell me that updates are ready until I'm shutting the machine down, at which point if I accidentally hit the big red shutdown button, WGA will be installed. No way to see which updates will be applied when that happens either.