Stained Windows! Microsoft to mark illegal copies

there is a term in OZ it is "Rip Off" And Aussies Hate a "Rip Off" or to be "Ripped off" IF MAny were to find that what they had paid for was not 100% they would want the "Rip off Merchant"to be caught by the short and curly, or at the very least to visit them with a 4x2 hardwood and manually reprogram their honesty chips (ie smash their teeth in)

I would suspect this sort of thing will be 80 to 90% effective in the normal consumer situation, but it will be ineffective where the people knowingly requested/installed the Hot OS,.

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Are you building the OS from scratch or do you image with the authentication key blanked

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I dont know about nihil, I dont build an OS. I use an OEM disk, install the OS, drivers, basic user applications and specilised user requested apps, install all updates then lock down the OS and apps.. hand the customer a box with ALL the OEM CD's including the OS install CD.

As for imaging.the Drive.. NO.. unless requested by the customer, and then It wont be activated
before Imaging. I havent checked with MS to see if this has changed, but as of 3 years ago ms did not want the system builder OEM's with out an existing OEM agreement to image an Activated OS.

I don't build boxes but I do actualyl do reinstalls and so on, and a couple times peopel have brought me their machines with a Windows CD saying "Make this work" so generally what I would do, is install the OS, make sure drivers work, then before I'm done, I'll throw a network cable in the NIC and put it on my LAN so I can download and install the updates, then I put ad-aware and some other tools on, update those, do a scan, put some form of anti virii on it, update it, do a scan, and then do a few basic precautions to lock it down, and send it home with them.

This part is slightly off topic:

My cousin bought a computer a few years ago. Like 2 years ago. It took him 1 week to need a reinstall because of the spyware and trojans he had gotten on there. some of you may remember me talking about it because he didn't want to pay me, so I grabbed PC-DOS 6 and put that on to help grind the wheels of payment and when he realised what happened when he booted up he paid me :)

After that he said "I don't even want windows on here it's a pain in the ass". OK, so I put Linux on there, set up SSH, and sent it home with him. It was WAY better. I could log in, update the machine, and I didn't give him root. It worked until he decided to sell it like a year ago.

So for home users whio know nothing about computers, I install Linux. It's much safer for peopel who don't know what they are doing. The browsing you don't need to worry about spyware, the email you don't need to worry about virii, and a simple ssh log in, they get updated and since the only updates that need a reboot are Kernel updates, I could do everything from my house without him bringing it over.

And if he needed a Kernel update, I would install it, and reboot the machine from my house over ssh. Wait about 1 minutes, and try logging in over SSH again.

Now, doing a Kernel update over SSH is NOT somethnig I recommend, but since he was related to me, and I could get to his house easy, it was OK for this. I actually posted some log files here once, someone had his IP from his Windows using days and was attempting to connect with a Trojan. Not surprising considering I found 12 Trojans on his machine.

Along the lines of what Undertaker said about the WGA md5 checking system

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...When the system is activate a hardware hash is created.. this is basicly a MD5 hash of the basic hardware information of the system this is compared to a hash of your product key.. If the Key hash matches a different hardware hash or a known group of pirated keys your escorted to the appropriate page.....

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there has certainly been a problem with a huge amount of people. I unfortunately have suffered from a similar experience where I did get locked out of a production server running a legit version of XP server. The solution SHOULD have been a simple call to Microsoft and an answer on how to resolve it. Instead it turned into a 3 day escalation, backtrack, re-escalation... until I finally got ahold of an understanding invidual who bypassed "policy" to assist me.

in a nutshell, due to the WGA checking system, Windows asked me to re-verify the authenticity of my installation after I replaced a motherboard on a server that fried. I being fully aware of WGA's checks and balance mechanisms, went along and abided by their "hoop jumping" policy. I called up their support, read the string of numbers to them, they read a string of numbers back, and Wa-La... i was back in. The problem occured again the next day when I put another stick of RAM in and a new graphics card, the system again asked me to re-verify my copy! At this point, the server had network connectivity so I chose the option to verify online. For one reason or another, it stated that I re-verified TOO many times and it locked me out of my system. Once again, I call their support, ask them what the dilli-o is. They verified my product key was indeed valid and not pirated. Yet they offered no support to unlock the machine, they said I had to pay 35$ a call to their Tech support to resolve the issue.
I said, let me get this straight... I upgrade my server.... your WGA protection locks me out each time I upgrade the hardware, and now I have to pay 35$ a call to get this issue resolved?
Short answer = Yes. Locked out of a production server by no fault of my own and now I had to pay for remediation. One of their techs had the nerve to tell me to reformat and reinstall.
Others told me to purchase a new key.

A search on google showed this was a widespread problem encountered by many.