Any business deploying Vista without a corporate image with a valid key already activated deserves to be shut down.  I think this is more a MS problem with redundancy and resiliency and not a problem with WGA.  I am not a big fan of WGA . . but I think it's practically invisible for most of their user base (who gets Windows pre-installed on the PC or uses the "recovery disk" to restore after a problem)  LMAO . .  who's going to step in?  Apple?  Not with their cost of ownership and hardware controls.  Linux?  Not with the perception that you have to be a uber-geek to support it.

Vista will be the accepted standard as people upgrade; even more so as SP1 and 2 roll out.

Bud.. my drive WAS VALIDATED! This was the first time i loaded it in about a month, it was from a "corporate" image disc with a VALID key, soooo...



Yes i see more and more people moving to ANYTHING other than windows, Linux, Ubuntu, Apple, etc.

I also see how this could be a MAJOR problem for companies like our that use windows (and unix) as a base for our control systems (because the customers WANTED windows), imagine all the plants with windows running them not being able to authenticate themselves and shutting down? What then? Its these kinds of things that make me wince when i look at the next 2-3 years upgrades for our customers, its going to be a nightmare. I would much rather we move to a proprietary version of Linux then use windows.

Its things like this that make corporations SHUTTER when they see their only choice is to be forced to upgrade (UP?) but thats just my 0.02

Heh, haven't tried a Windows Update in a while. I run XP. When I saw a few months or so that one of the "updates" it wanted to put on my system was to check my windows key to see that it was valid, I said "do not install and do not ask me again." I run a valid version of Windows. But I don't need Windows snooping in on my computer and possibly screwing up telling me that my copy is invalid. Guess I was right.

The issue of whether WGA is bad or not (it is) is an ancillary issue.

If Microsoft were truly serious about their stated purpose for WGA, they would not allow it to be (or be controlled by) a single point of failure. Reliable, high availability systems are a commodity these days, and there's no legitimate excuse for this kind of failure (certainly not for a company with the resources of Microsoft). It is incompetence, pure and simple. It's either incompetence in the server room, or it's incompetence in management.

It is said, 'do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence', but I tend to go with the corollary of that statement, 'any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.'

I generally have nothing against Microsoft, at least as far as their software goes, some of it is quite good, and I find it useful to be conversant in as many platforms as possible.

However, WGA (and the stated reasons for it) is disingenuous. It does absolutely nothing to curtail the primary sources of piracy, at best, it makes casual piracy just a tad more difficult, but it doesn't really even do much for that.

I'm completely okay with Microsoft working to profit from their work, and to discourage piracy as they can. However, inconveniencing your honest customers and treating them like criminals, all the while having no real effect on piracy, isn't the way to do it.

WGA only exists to inconvenience end users from casually pirating the OS from their more knowledgeable friends.