I just sent the following comment to the Microsoft employee, Alex Kochis, Director, Genuine Windows, responsible for the Windows Genuine Advantage program. (It should be named Windows Genuine Pain-in-the-ass Program.)
I am a TechNet member and a Microsoft Partner. I am running Windows 7 Ultimate RTM (64bit). Windows 7 reports that "Windows has been activated".
I keep getting alerts "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting…"
I am not. Your god awful Genuine Advantage software is in my face and only because you don’t know what you are doing. I once had a Vista machine terminated by your servers going down. I am more than a little tired of this.
I am frustrated and angered by your incompetence. Either get this right of go away but stop annoying me.
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Richard,
I was doing a software update last week and didn’t realize (read: wasn’t paying attention) it installed the Genuine Advantage for office. Sure enough after the install I tried to run Excel and it told me it wasn’t legit, which it is. So I wound up doing a restore point to get rid of WGA. Definitely a pain.
Marc
Richard, sorry to hear about your experience. You too Marc, I will say that the software is actually highly accurate in general. I’m happy to help look into the situation to figure out what is happening.
Richard, you should have my email through this contact form.
Thanks,
Alex
Alex:
As I wrote “Either get this right of go away but stop annoying me.” I don’t want to spend my time fixing what Microsoft broke. I only do that for clients or myself when all else fails. Something is wrong with WGA not me.
Richard
I recently found a nifty hole in the MS site that let’s you get around many of the WGA requirements. Honestly, they could try harder. Check it out:
http://www.lustforge.com/2011/07/02/windows-downloads-without-windows-genuine-advantage/