Options for 'Fixing' A Pirated Copy of Windows 601
PunkOfLinux writes "My parents are running a pirated copy of windows that my mom received from a teacher at school. My parents want to go legit, and buy a copy of Windows, but they are afraid of deleting everything and having to reinstall all their programs. Seeing as I know you guys will have an answer, I'm going to ask you: What would you do in this situation?"
Why bother? (Score:4, Interesting)
Great comment! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Buy an OEM copy (Score:5, Interesting)
Judging from Microsoft's 'System Builder' documentation, I don't think you even need to bother doing that. Buying and installing an OEM version of Windows onto your PC is perfectly fine and legal. But by doing so, you've now created a 'new PC' in Microsoft's eyes and so you no longer have access to any support from them, as support for OEM software is to be obtained from your system builder (namely, you, in this case). So you're legal but completely on your own. At least this is the way I read it.
further questions (Score:1, Interesting)
your parents have a copy of windows they know is pirated, but now want to go legit. they want to do so without having to clear their PC and lose all the settings/etc. they've accumulated over the years with all the installed programs and so forth.
leaving aside whether clearing everything may be a good idea anyway (accumulated cruft, malware etc.) - what do you mean, about not having to reinstall software? are we talking *legit* software? it seems a bit strange to have pirated windows, but legit applications (particularly if the application would have cost a lot more than the windows licence). if the intended path is to get the windows legit, but you've still got heaps of pirated applications, then you've got more problems than you realise you do. unless, of course, it's a calculated gamble that you are more likely to be hit by enforcemeny from MS, than by the various other application vendors.
i think what you need to do is to write down the cost of "properly going legit" - all the applications you want to use, etc., total it up, and decide if you have that kind of money. and then decide if you are prepared to go into a completely free environment - any one of the linux distros.
although it IS "free as in freedom", as a practical matter, free as in beer makes a big difference too, potentially even more. you'd have to go through hassle and pain learning a new setup, and the features may well be worse off etc. for particular applications (GIMP != Photoshop, but seriously, if you can afford the price of photoshop you're not in the common group). but some times that's what it means to go legit. I mean, I look at the price tags of a lot of things that I want, and then I realise, "shit, i'm poor". but, you know, this is how the capitalist system works. and then maybe you can think a bit more about, what does it really mean to have a system where the cost of producing something is X, but the price of it may be X + "arbitrary number determined for profit maximisation", vs what could be determined as a "fair price".
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Let's get the answer out of the way (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Buy an OEM copy (Score:3, Interesting)
I do think one should buy the software one uses (I know I do), but I don't expect
any personal support from Microsoft; I'm already glad if they fix known (security)
bugs in a decent time frame.
Re:Let's get the answer out of the way (Score:3, Interesting)
The directory containing that file also has an Office 2003 key :-)
Re:Simple... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not certain, and definitely not equating to profits, which are down.
Wii is the one to watch.
Total bullshit. What's happened was predicted a decade ago. Microsoft has already picked all the "low-hanging fruit", and now needs more bodies to squeeze more revenue out of marginal products.
The current prediction is a flat stock value, because of the buyback. Its been estimated that without the buyback, the stock would have lost about 20%. This buyback is confverting an asset with actual value (cash) into an asset with no intrinsic value(stock). But it was either do the buyback or lose even more, as the assets that are held as stock would have lost even more value.
No its not, and it won't be within the foreseable future. http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/28/HNwinsuc cessor_1.html [infoworld.com] They haven't even got a clue as to where they want it to go, except for some vague mumblings about "better multiprocessor support".
Heck, even a year after they "deliver" Vista, they still won't have delivered what was slated to go into it originally under the name "blackcomb".
Nope. They're in a bind on Office pricing. Lower the price, cannibalize revenues from existing customers. Maintain the price, lose existing customers. Besides, there are no "must haves" for the vast majority of users in the current version, never mind a hypothetical future upgrade. Their only option at this point is to continue to bleed slowly.
Same problem as #6 above. They simply can't afford to lower the price - it will mean less $$$, without increasing sales. That's the problem with being a near-monopoly - you're your own worst competitor. Even Microsofts' own employees are saying there's no real reason to upgrade.
And yet they've doubled their laptop sales, then doubled them again. They're now 12% of all laptops sold. Microsoft is going to miss the "back-to-school" surge next month, so expect to see mac laptops rise to between 15 and 20% by year-end, as Microsoft also misses the pre-Christmas sales. Expect desktops to follow, as users begin to demand seamless compatibility between their mac laptops and their home desktops.
IE is bleeding market share every month. The people who have changed will never go back, because the trust is gone. Microsoft has actually already lost the browser wars - its just taking tie for the news to spread from the head (early adopters) to the rest of the body.
People don't care any more. They don't buy an OS for its features - they just want to use it to do their work, play games, surf the net, etc. Windows95 was the last "gee whiz" release. Those days are gone. They'll never be back. Even the features that wer yanked from vista are not "must-haves" any more - and there will be free 3rd-party replacements for anyone who doesn't wan
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm in favor of changes to intellectual property law. You talk as if the law is holy or something. But we all know very well there are many bad laws on the books thanks to selfish interests who got rich off the masses and then used that wealth to buy laws. They're the ones laughing at the poor schmucks who waste time lobbying. Can't lobby effectively without a lot of money. The ultimate message that the whole idea of "intellectual property" is seriously broken has yet to sink in. How to get that message across? Don't buy or license their "property" and make sure they understand why! Whether that means pirating, boycotting, or finding alternatives is up to the individuals.
It'd be a poor world where everything, tangible or not, has to be owned, where it's considered treason against Capitalism to not play the game and haggle, scratch and claw, and account for every penny. I know what such a world is like because I was in one in miniature. I was once in a private school attractive to wealthy and powerful people. I wonder if you know how those people think? Think of the movies Titanic and Dead Poets' Society. Everything has a price. Save a lady from drowning herself? Worth at least a $20 and a dinner invitation, thank you and go away when dinner is over, you've been paid. No, that was not typical Hollywood bashing of the rich, that's really how those people are. One of the crazier things at the school was the system the students had going for software piracy. You had to have a stake. At that school, these children of the wealthy were not going to give away a copy of some computer game, it had to be "paid" for with a copy of something the "owner" didn't have. A copy for a copy. Strange how fussy those students were about "something for something" all while blissfully ignoring the copyrights of the game makers. But they were always two-faced like that. They were as much and probably more into piracy as everyone else. Intellectual property rights are for little people to obey?
So tell us, where's your righteous outrage on behalf of those people who got screwed into paying for Windows twice, thanks to WGA? To compensate, maybe it's okay for them to pirate Vista when it comes out? Yes, yes, it'd be a lot of fun to drag MS into court and win a lawsuit over this, but it's a lot quicker to just pirate, or pay for Windows again. Saves time, and time is money. Saves on court costs too. 2 wrongs don't make a right, but often a wrong for a wrong is a lot more efficient and cost effective. Admit it, lobbying isn't in the same league as piracy for time, effort, and effectiveness.
Re:XP Pro Corp to Home = No Repair (Score:2, Interesting)
But in situations like this, I think there's a lot to be said for a format & reinstall. Don't get me wrong - I think this can be a massive cop-out on many occasions, and I believe that lots of people do it too easily because it's easier than analysing and learning about a problem - but in a situation where I'm not sure how Windows will behave (am I sure that Pro will repair the particular pirate version of XP that they have?) then format-and-reinstall is a very proven solution.
On a system that's otherwise working fine, and has been for some time, then I'd rather spend an hour or 90 minutes removing malware or a virus, or fixing an "inexplicable" browser problem than doing a format-and-reinstall. But when I have to do a format-and-reinstall then it's a VERY straight-forward process - I back up everything on the hard-drive with a knoppix CD to my portable drive, copy the back-up to another machine, dd the drive with a few zeros so that the Windows install starts on a blank sheet, and let it get on with things. I charge this at three hours of my time, but I'd guess that I probably only spend two or two-and-a-half actually sitting at or waiting on the machine because I base this fixed price on being able to take it away and leave it running in the corner of my study for a couple of days. Thus the customer gets a "brand new" machine with all a fresh operating system, all the Windows updates, I reinstall any software disks they give me, drag & drop My Documents back into place (and explain how to search the "Old Stuff" folder I've copied back to their hard-drive from my portable disk), reimport their address book & emails; when I take the machine back I check their printer and broadband works and the customer is usually like "Wow! It's never been this fast before!!"
I'll say again that this isn't always the best way to resolve problems, but many users don't have innumerable programs installed on their machine, nor such a customised desktop or set of preferences that it'll take them long to get things back to a way they're comfortable with. Often there is so much crap installed by the OEM at the factory that users have never experienced a truly fresh install of XP before!!
Ned.
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
What is it about products that can be encoded digitally that some people think that their creators dont need to eat?
Grow up, child.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
He said artificial scarcity. Not "protected artificially."
The difference is that real property is naturally scarce, or more technically it is rivalrous, and thus inherently "protectable" since there is only one instance to keep track of, either you have it or you don't.
that recognition works just fine as long as everyone plays by the same rules.
However, it is both many orders of magnitude more difficult to enforce the rules for information than it is for real property, and it is in conflict with human nature (the natural urge to share knowledge that is probably a key, if not the key to the development of civilization). So, its much harder to enforce and because it conflicts with human nature, people naturally violate it many more times than they do similar rules for real property.
All that enforcement eventually results in a higher cost - the more society tries to enforce those rules, the more it costs us. Many people believe that the additional costs involved for protecting ownership of ideas are now high enough that they make the model infeasible, that it is a net drain on society that retards progress rather than encourages it.
People like cliffski, with their heads stuck in the box that hollywood has selfishly crammed it into, can't see that the model is breaking, if not already broken. And what's worse, they can't see that alternative models can, and probably must, take its place. Models that harness human nature rather than oppose it. Instead all you get are ironic comments like "Try thinking through the implications to changing the business model," because his own lack of imagination prevents him from thinking things through enough to come up with a business model that can work given the new parameters of modern digital distribution.
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
No economic value, perhaps, but there is still utility value associated with them.
Frankly, not being able to get anything in exchange for trading in a car, and having to endure longer waits in traffic, would be a small price to pay for living in a world where it's possible. That would be a friggin' utopia! No hunger, because anyone can copy whatever food they want; no deaths during heat waves, because anyone can get an air conditioner, a generator, and all the fuel they need to run it, just by pressing a button; and so on. Of course, we'd have to deal with all that pollution, heat, etc.. but as soon as someone finds a solution to those or any other problems, it can spread across the globe in an instant.
Similarly, I believe that making it a little harder for certain folks to earn a living by rearranging bits is a small price to pay for living in a world where those bits are freely accessible to anyone with the right tools. (I said harder, not impossible: you'd just have to charge directly for your labor, and expend some effort to find an audience who can pool their money together to pay you. If a political candidate can raise millions of dollars from lots of small individual donations, just by putting a thermometer graph and DONATE NOW button on his site, then it should be easy for artists to do the same.)
You should look before you leap... (Score:3, Interesting)
Kernel rootkits made this a bit more challenging, since you can't trust what Windows is telling you about what you see through these tools. The answer to that is to boot to trusted media (like a BartPE disk) and check out the potential autostart locations from that. Since the malware isn't loaded, it can't make the system lie to you.
Thanks to the newer kernel rootkits that hide files in NTFS alternate data streams, you have to scan for those as well from trusted media. But that's doable- there are tools which work from BartPE which will enumate files with ADS streams, and you can also check for ADS paths in the list of drivers which load a boot-time. Then when you think you've got it clean, throw a sniffer on the machine's LAN connection and see if anything unexpected happens.
Thus, it's really quite possible to manually discover and "kill" most infections with a reasonably high degree of confidence, if you have enough practice and experience. The level of assurance isn't high enough for a corporate server, but it's usually sufficient for home users and in small businesses, considering the cost of a from-scratch rebuild.
I do admit I'm a bit more qualified than most techs who do this... I've got a computer science degree, and have been doing IT stuff professionally for 14 years. You've got to have a pretty solid grasp of windows internals to do this well.
-R
Re:Copyright is a useful compromise (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, typo: that should obviously have read "such a system could never work without Big Brother-scale surveillance of any use of copyright materials".