Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

One In Five Windows Installs Is Non-Genuine

Posted by kdawson on from the false-positives dept.

snib writes "Microsoft disclosed Monday that, according to reports collected by the notorious Windows Genuine Advantage tool on millions of users' PCs, 22% of all Windows installs do not pass its validation tests and have therefore been deemed non-genuine. Quoting: 'Since WGA launched in July 2005, over 512 million users have attempted to validate their copy of Windows, Microsoft said. Of those, the non-genuine rate was 22.3 percent... [T]he Business Software Alliance... reports that 35 percent of the world's software is pirated (22 percent in North America)...'"

2 of 481 comments (clear)

  1. 100% Non-Genuine OS by kbob88 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Actually I always thought that all copies of Windows were a non-genuine operating system. What with all the bugs, security problems, lame features, etc.

    Should probably read that 100% of Windows installs are genuine crap, but only 78% are genuinely licensed crap.

  2. Re:The number is high by Mongoose · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Actually, my old school did something different. If you graduated within a certain time you had the license assigned to you. I also got various pretty, shiny XP/Office discs with all the nice holograms and papers. This is the only reason I even have XP albeit in VMWare. I recently installed it VMWare, after having ran it on two other Althon XPs as an eSATA plug-n-go OS. XP is really horrible for that, but I didn't have to do the phone call activation until installing in VMWare. I think that XP install has been on 4-5? motherboards now until I finally just said screw this and made it a VMWare image. Now I can just carry that image around, and not worry about effectively reinstalling for every eSATA use.

    Yes, I had to make my own XP install image for those eSATA drives. All that being said I rarely use Windows still, and I find WINE superior to VMWare for much of my needs. If WINE could just fix OpenGL support for gtk+ applications then I could test my Windows apps in WINE only. ;)