I installed windows on a spare harddrive on my winbook laptop from the recovery disk. Normally I would never do this, but I've been trying to get wifi on this laptop working forever and I'm now desperate enough to install windows.
All of this is perfectly legal. This is the correct recovery disk for this box, and I read the windows code off the legal windows certification sticker on the bottom of the laptop. But it won't activate. I don't care enough to make a stink about this, although I'm certainly never going to call the U.S. to get this working. I run Linux, I'm just in windows temporarily to get the wifi drivers off here so I can try ndiswrapper.
This just strengthens my general antipathy to Windows though, and all things Microsoft. Everything on this box is totally legal, but they won't let me activate my legal license.
I wouldn't be surprised if the reason for this lack of activation is because windows has been installed on this box more than, say, 3 times. That's a reasonable number of times to reinstall due to virus problems and such. My brother (who previously owned this laptop) might have installed more often than that since he's a bit of a geek. I don't care about Microsoft's piracy problems since I don't contribute to any of it. They should make things work for legal users and they can worry about the pirates on their own time instead of having me waste mine blogging about their stupid and paranoid software.
These days I am the BSA. I tell everyone I meet that I won't work with them on their computer problems unless their software is legal. They can buy legal software, or they can use free software, or they can go without my advice and assistance. It seems to work. No one tries to get me to work on Windows boxes anymore. Anyway, if they're a windows shop, I just point them at windows users. I don't want the headaches of working with windows boxes if I can't even get my own personal laptop with it's perfectly legal certificate of authenticity activated.
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