The key management server that dishes out the activations should have caught that and prevented new installs from activating against it. Although that would be too logical if that was the case.

I remember ads for dongle emulators in the seedy advertising market place in the back of the magazine. Whats funny is how lazy software developers are when it comes to implementing the protection....

OEM copies of Windows (pre-Windows 8) generally aren't activated online, they use OEM SLP or SLIC keys paired with an installed certificate and OEM BIOS marker. Unless you install with System Builder or retail media, the restore discs/recovery partition image that come with OEM machines generally come SLIC activated. That being said, the Windows 7 keys on the side of countless OEM machines have never been activated against Microsoft's systems. It could even be the source of this person's keys.

This all changed with Windows 8 though, now OEMs have to embed a unique product key in each machine's UEFI BIOS and activate it online.

MS14-066 (along with the MS14-064 OLE fix) was released for POSReady 2009, so technically XP was patched for it. http://support.microsoft.com/k...

But Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 does. ;) I wonder if they have been keeping up with security patches, particularly the OLE one.

An extra $20 gets you a usable machine (sometimes it goes on sale for $200): http://www.microcenter.com/pro...

Granted it isn't as small as the Stream, but it certainly isn't bulky or heavy. 4GB of RAM is plenty for current apps and storage isn't a concern. I landed up getting two for a friend of mine to replace some really old XP boxen. Performance was good for day to day tasks and the Celeron N2830 has GPU accelerated video for playing 1080p cat videos on YouTube. The only "con" I have with it is that it only has 2 USB ports.

You have to provide a superuser password to install packages in Linux. On Windows you would get a UAC prompt.

Its a trap!

The smaller carts are to force the basket-taking shoppers into taking something bigger.

Fun fact: The Powerbook 100 was designed by Sony. Apple gave them a Macintosh Portable and told them to "make it smaller". As for the hard drives, all Powerbook 100 and 500 series (including the 68k based Duos) used 2.5" SCSI drives until the PowerPC models came out. One exception was the PB190, the last 68k computer Apple sold.

MS didn't even bother to update the "Add Font" dialog until Windows 7. The one in Vista was still from the 3.x era, complete with a 16-bit style COMDLG file picker!

I seem to recall Microsoft saying that more installs of Windows Server were of the GUI-less "Server Core" version. Microsoft even boosts about how much more secure it is and that it requires fewer patches. Maybe they are trying to push the rest of the hold outs to Core by adding Metro!

Windows Explorer lacks a proper "orthodox file manager" view. I miss the File Manager that came with Norton Navigator and NT Tools (it doesn't work with Vista/7). I haven't had a chance to try the Windows port of DirectoryOpus yet. It certainly makes life easier on an Amiga though!

You have to turn off the system wide font smoothing, which in typical Microsoft tradition isn't with the font settings where the ClearType controls are. Go to System > Advanced system settings and uncheck "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts" under the Visual Effects tab. I also see the color fringing and find ClearType completely unusable with negative contrast text (dark text on a light background). It seems to work better with light text on dark backgrounds as the sub pixels are much less noticeable.

In Windows 7: Personalization > Window Color > Advanced Appearance Settings

In WIndows 8.x, you can only resize the fonts. There are free utilities that will change the UI fonts (google "Windows 8 Font Changer".)

Microsoft tossed out Tahoma and forced Segoe UI on everyone back in 2007. I don't recall it being that big of a deal.