So true! Piracy was rampant in the 80's among those "in the know" and it didn't kill anyone's profits!
I had a RAM slot die in my Dell C840 going cross country last summer, halving my total RAM from 1GB to 512MB. Had to stop in Montana & cell phone in for re-activation or I could not log in to check my Streets & Trips map I was using to navigate from NJ to WA! Luckily the automated system gave me what I need without complaint, but where would I have been had it not? Since then I realized one of my Dell pressed XP discs (likely left over media from some job I did) does not need activation nor a key (embedded in the setup.txt) and I use that on my systems. Frack 'em, they got their pound of flesh, why should I jump through hoops just because of a hardware change? After all I've never called M$ or Dell for OS support and never will/need to, so no benefit to me or money lost by them IMHO. FORC5 wrote: > didn't seem to hurt profits much. >:-} > current anti piracy can be a pain. There is something terribly wrong when one wants to change a hard drive or video card ( in Vista )( I had to reactivate Vista when I stretched a 200gb partition to 250.) and have to call mother to ask permission. Especially when MS issues SW to Dell and the like that does not. Just restored a Dell with RTM sw, what a pleasure to not input a key or need to activate. And it was a genuine install disk, not a restore disk because I streamed sp2 into it. > > I have a customer box on the bench who I replaced a MB 2 weeks ago, activation was painless but as luck would have it suffered crib death and I have to replace it again and windows will not even let me log on without first activating which I haven't done yet but will require a phone call which can be painless or a pain. I have only had them refuse one on a machine because I did not replace the MB with a exact factory replacement. SUCKS. Last week the system was down and I spent hours on the phone getting a system activated. Most customers have no idea about all of this and I certainly can not charge shop rate while waiting. > I say the 70's and 80's was good for business and current scheme is not. ( greed ) > fp ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss an email again! Yahoo! Toolbar alerts you the instant new Mail arrives. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/
