Come get me Microsoft!

Since I came out and said that I was committed to keeping this blog alive, or at least beating it until I was sure it was dead, I figured I would post something. This story is several weeks old, but it frustrates me enough that I felt it was worth a post. Plus they say that confession is good for the soul, so here goes...

I pirated a copy of XP the other day and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Now before you call the software police or before Microsoft really does come to get me, let me explain my position. I reformatted a friend's computer over Christmas break. He had bought the computer from Dell and it shipped with a copy of Windows XP Home. In the process of moving, he had lost all of his Dell discs so I got ahold of a copy of XP Home used a burnt disc to install it using his legitimate product key. You wouldn't think that this would be an issue - I didn't use the same product key on two computers and I certainly didn't use the burnt copy of XP Home to pirate anything at all! It was a perfectly legitimate purpose - no different than using a backup copy of the software. That was until Windows Genuine Advantage caught up with me. Apparently, someone at Microsoft thought it would be brilliant to differentiate between the OEM and retail versions of XP. This would be fine and dandy, except the product keys for OEM installs don't work on retail installs and vice versa.

So I did the right thing and called both Microsoft and Dell to try and come up with a solution. Neither party would help me in the least and Dell tech support actually hung up on me. (I did provoke them, but the tech tried to make an argument which was just plain wrong. But I digress...) I suppose I could have downloaded an OEM copy of XP Home off of BitTorrent, but it would be time consuming and who really trusts BitTorrented OSes anyway? So I committed a crime: I used a copy of XP Profession that I am using on another computer. Ironically enough, Windows Genuine Advantage doesn't seem to have a problem with that.