Windows Genuine Disadvantage
It is bound to happen to most of us sooner or late. It will happen to you. You may not know it now, but it will happen and when it does, it will irritate you to no end. Am I talking of death or tax? No, this is the other thing in life that can be considered inevitable: Windows XP turning on its user!
It happen to me! And why did this horrible thing happen to me? What could I have been possibly doing at the time to deserve having this happen to me? Was I looking at a website I shouldn’t be looking at or was I doing something else equally as naughty? What could I have possibly done to incur the wrath of Microsoft, who feels it necessary to treat legitimate users like common thieves?
What did I do to deserve this? I was only trying to plug my MP3 player into a USB port on the back of my computer and I unplugged my USB mouse. Now, when I plugged my mouse back in, I found it wasn’t working and I tried to reset the wireless receiver for my mouse as well as the mouse. Upon failing to do so, I got a pop-up window telling me that it was an unrecognisable USB device, so I rebooted.
Upon rebooting back into Windows, I encountered a window telling me that “significant changes” were made to my hardware so I had to reactivate Windows. I had known about this kind of thing (see: Namaste, Microsoft)but until tonight, it had never happened to be before. Alas…
Mind you, I haven’t had this install of Windows up for long. I recently got a better desktop (Athlon Dual-core 4200+) than the one I had before, which was an Athlon AMD 3200+ , and I had to upgrade from my old, loyal faithful 60gig IDE drive since my newer machine had no way for my IDE drive to work. So, on my first SATA drive, I installed my copy of Windows XP Pro (Vista is too buggy for my liking and takes way too much file control away from me) and I had no problems with my legitimate product key. This was back in December of 2007.
Now when Windows Activation pops up, after your first boot, it kindly informs you that you have 3 days to register your product. It registered successfully. Fast forward to today where my itsy-bitsey little itty-witty action of unplugging my wireless USB mouse triggers a ’significant change’. So, now I can’t even use my legitimate key.
I wasn’t even touching any part of the MoBo. It was something as meaningless as a mouse. Mice break all the time. Why should Windows think that this is a ’significant change’? Do they want to inconvenience their clients; their business clients whose last concern is that replacing a mouse would amount to a loss of productivity because they have to reactivate Windows in order to continue business? Or do they reserve this “privilege” for home users who are likely to only buy a Windows (genuine) product once every few years?
Microsoft is nothing else knows how to make the Windows experience nothing short of aggravating. Thanks to this, I, or rather my husband, (since I’m at work tomorrow), has to call Microsoft’s ’support’ desk to resolve this. Too bad I’m going to miss the fireworks.
Stumble It!
