Driver Update Can Cause Vista Deactivation

KrispySausage writes "After weeks of grueling troubleshooting, I've finally had it confirmed by Microsoft Australia and USA — something as small as swapping the video card or updating a device driver can trigger a total Vista deactivation. Put simply, your copy of Windows will stop working with very little notice (three days) and your PC will go into "reduced functionality" mode, where you can't do anything but use the web browser for half an hour."

Comments

A similar experience is what drove me away from

[antifoidulus]

Windows for good. I had bought a retail copy of XP(not cheap!) and installed it on my laptop. However, a bug with XP caused it to crash before I could activate it(hell, before I even knew I had to) and managed to reset the clock to 1980. Usually this would just be a minor annoyance, but it turns out that if you monkey with the clock before you activate XP(and maybe even after, I don't know), they assume you are trying to pirate it and refuse to let you do anything. So after I plunked down $200 for the thing, I had to go call their number(and this was overseas, so there were some language issues to boot) and take a half hour out of my day to prove to them I didn't steal the thing I just bought. It was at that point I realized there are other OSs out there, and I have been Windows free for 4 years and couldn't be happier.

This problem is hardly unique to Vista, and is just going to drive more and more people away from Microsoft. Microsoft still acts like they are the only game in town. They just refuse to accept that the competition has improved significantly from the time XP was released....

Re:Fool me once.....

[twoboxen]

I didn't see Vista as any sort of gain when I first started using it (before switching back to XP) on my gaming PC, but now as a developer who has been forced to port applications to the platform I all-out loathe it. It is a disaster to use. I've developed a lot on linux, a lot on windows, and a little on Mac. I've never seen anything like this. The issues you run into--really dumbfounding. People complain about the extra web development time IE causes... Vista is almost as bad from XP! Think about that for a second. This isn't trying to use a bunch of cute IE tags. This is a new version of a "backwards compatible" version of an operating system. Thanks, Bill!!!

Re:I've already experienced this...

[varmittang]

Not a pain now, but when you update your drivers for something else like NIC card, well, reactivate again. Then the video card so you can play that new game a with some better frame rates, reactivate again. Upgrade the BIOS on the Motherboard, reactivate again. This will become a huge pain once you have to do this a bunch of times over the life of your computer. And as an IT worker who sometimes have to do these driver updates or BIOS updates for flaws in them that cause problems, especially BIOS updates on laptops to get the fans or docking stations to work properly, this will become a real pain when the Vista upgrade comes.

Sneezing can cause deactivation...

[benmhall]

Or at least is seems like that some times.

At work, I have a laptop (ThinkPad T60) that dual-boots Ubuntu and Vista. Vista is on there only as a way to force myself to get used to it, as I have to support it. Early after Vista's release, an update _from Microsoft_ caused it to be deactivated, had to call MS. (This was later an acknowledged bug that they patched.)

More recently, I used Ghost to go from a 120GB drive down to an 80GB. This too knocked out the activation and the system went into reduced functionality mode. I had to call MS, eventually got someone in India (who I have to admit was very polite and spoke very well.) I had to read off what seemed like a 40 digit code _twice_. Once to the voice-activated system and then again to the person. (No, they apparently couldn't cache this very annoying and labourious bit of data entry.)

I told him why I was having to call and also warned that, as a SysAdmin, I do this kind of thing all of the time and that I was sure I'd be calling again with this exact same Microsoft-imposed problem on this exact same system. I was politely told that this is how the product works and that there was no way around this.

This from an MSDN-issued Vista Business edition. Ugh.

Thankfully, installing Ubuntu on it didn't knock out activation, though I wouldn't put it past MS in the future. If I didn't have to support it at work, I wouldn't touch Vista with a ten foot pole. My hope is that MS eventually tightens the screws enough to push everyone away. So far though, people seem to be much more tolerant of this sort of thing than I would have hoped.

This happened to me this past weekend

[farbles]

I had my Vista drive booted up to update drivers and try out the new video card.

Warning! Warning! You have three days to activate Vista or it will be in reduced functionality mode.

WTF? The video card was the first hardware change in six months. And WTF is with the three day warning when I can run Vista as a non-registered user for weeks??

*Fine* I click on the activation icon and get told my license is already in use so I have to do the telephone activation.

I hate the telephone activation. First you have to phone them up and type in the 46 number sequence (WTF, am I arming an ICBM here?) then they always tell you that you'll have to talk to a representative who asks you for the 46 number sequence again since the last machine just went and chucked out the one you just spent ten minutes reading into the phone. Then you have to type in a different 46 digit ICBM arming code to use the OS you already paid money for. The call cost $5 on my friend's pay-as-you-go cell phone.

Hey, Microsoft! I paid $300 for your POS OS. If I had pirated it I would have none of this bullcrap but no, I had to be an honest customer and this is my reward. Do you wonder people hate you?

And this is caused by driver updating yet. The one thing a Vista user has no choice but to do is update all multimedia drivers every few weeks as new releases come out to fix the previous releases problems with Vista.

Amazing business model there, Lou. You guys think of this by yourselves, did you?

Re:Acrobat

[Just Some Guy]

I agree, you can't blame Adobe for not wanting to fix a 5 year old application which is 3 versions out of date. You can blame Microsoft though for breaking it. If it worked it should continue to work.

I find myself doing the unusual position of supporting MS here. A lot of applications did things The Wrong Way or used undefined, undocumented behaviors that they should never have relied upon.

An example for coders: imagine a system function named "foo" that returns 0 on success or nonzero on failure. The XP implementation happened to return 1 as its specific, unchanging value of nonzero, although that was never documented anywhere. It just did. In Vista, foo is modified so that it still returns 0 on success, or one of many defined constant values specifying exactly which error occurred. Finally, imagine that lazy programmers who should've been writing

if !foo() { handle error }

were instead writing

if foo() == 1 { handle error }

because those two have been functionally identical for a few years.

In that all-too-common scenario, what is MS supposed to do? Their main options are:

1. Revert to the old behavior, preventing all new software from benefitting from that functionality.
2. Keep the new, better behavior but endure endless whining from people using fundamentally broken software.
3. Change the program loader to wrap each executable and library with checks like

   if progname == 'adobeBrokenv1.3' { use old api }

I don't envy them the hole they dug for themselves. They would have been far better off if long ago they'd made it clear that their published API was a contract. If you follow it to the letter then your programs would continue to work. If you break with it, all bets are off. Everyone else does this. If you link against GNU libc and your software suddenly crashing, its maintainers would look at what you're doing and either fix libc or tell you that you'd screwed up and to fix your software to follow the published docs. Instead, MS once again used a greedy algorithm to optimize in the short term for developers! developers! developers! no matter how badly that screwed up their underpinnings.

Honestly, I think .NET is perhaps their last chance to get this right. I think they should take a hardline and change constant values and randomize undefined return values and otherwise deliberate tweak things so that API-compliant software would still work fine but everything else would crash horribly every other month or so. It'd be a painful transition for people used to the idea of MS doing the work of fixing vendor software for the rest of eternity, but maybe they could finally get rid of the backward bug compatibility albatross around their neck.

Re:Fool me once.....

[caluml]

C:\Users I didn't know that. Now, if they can just move crucial binaries for system operation to c:\bin, other binaries into c:\usr\bin, and install applications in c:\opt, we'll be getting somewhere.

(Let's not confuse them with sbin dirs - just yet.)

What was that quote about understanding, and reinventing - badly? Next they'll do away with the registry and go back to config files, not require a GUI for some server type stuff, and improve their cmd.exe.....

Re:Fool me once.....

[Master of Transhuman]

Anybody want to address whether you can move "C:\Users" to its own partition - so you don't have to worry about losing profiles when you reinstall the OS?

Thought not.

See here for issues with even trying:

Biggest problem with backups on Windows - Documents and Settings. Why? Because if you try to back it up, you get errors because Windows has open files in there that you can't touch from within the OS.

Can you say STUPID? I knew you could.

Try backing up /home from within Linux. Problems? Nope.

Try reinstalling Linux with your /home on another partition - the preferred "best practices" setup on Linux. Problems? Nope.

And if anybody at Microsoft from 1990 on had any clue, they would have looked at how UNIX did this simple stuff. It isn't rocket science, it's common sense and experience running an OS from the 1970's.

And Microsoft ignored all of it.