Windows Genuine Advantage Causes Problems

Microsoft's Genuine Advantage software has often been criticized for its "spyware" like behavior which includes forcing computer users to call home just to see if their software is still legitimate. A bug in the software over the weekend marked many people who legitimately purchased copies of Windows XP and Vista as owning pirated copies has left many consumers in an uproar. There systems were switched to limited functionality until the bug was fixed late Sunday. The response to the bug from angry consumers has caused the Redmond Washington software company to take a "hands-off" approach.

Despite Microsoft marking the Windows Genuine Advantage software as a benefit to the consumer, that has never been the intended purpose of the software. The calling home behavior has always been designed to help protect the intellectual property rights of the software giant. Apple's Operating system, far less popular among computer users does not include it, and Linux, as an open source operating system often available for free to computer users would not need such protection.

The response to the problem from Microsoft has been less than consumer friendly and they blame the problem on a hardware failure. What is not clear from the published reports is whether or not the hardware failure was in the company's computers or whether Microsoft blames it on a compatibility error with existing hardware.

While ways due exist of disabling Windows Genuine advantage, but most of them require a little more knowledge of the inner workings of the operating system than most users have. One company has released a utility that will disable the notifications of the controversial software, which is not needed for security updates. Microsoft has offered a quick-fix web page to restore functionality to Windows users affected by the bug. Since the bug is likely to occur in future updates, Windows users may want to bookmark it for future reference.

For those who do not need Windows for gaming purposes, which seems to be the only enterprise that still for the sake of hardware compatibility requires the use of the Microsoft OS, switching to Linux of Apple's OS X can get rid of the inconvenience. If you want to switch to Linux, AC writer Tsu Do Nimh did a comprehensive article on what you need to do to switch to Ubuntu. Sadly, until better hardware support and ports come out for Linux, many online gamers are still stuck with Gates's software unless they are a super hacker.

Sources:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2C1895%2C1979756%2C00.asp

http://tech.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1348156.php/Microsofts_WGA_fails_marking_some_legit_users_as_criminals