Microsoft Scousers!

A friend of mine bought a laptop from ebay the other week. Arrived with no problems. Very friendly seller. The laptop had the hologram Windows XP CD Key sticker on the bottom of the laptop too :)

He came across a problem and had to patch windows XP to SP1. After applying the patch and rebooting XP then asked to activate windows again. So it generated a product ID code. He phoned Microsoft, and got some chap from Liverpool. He gave him the product ID code and the microsoft chap then reeled back the activation code which my friend entered into the laptop, hit enter and the screen went blank. He told the Microsoft bloke what had happened, and he hung up on him. So my friend phoned back since it had appeared Microsoft had broke his computer ??? He spoke to another bloke at Microsoft and got told that it was an illegal copy he was using and was given the nuke code which is given out to people that attempt to activate an illegal copy of windows xp. The nuke code appears to fdisk your hard disk basically deleting your primary hard drive partition.


So the laptop had a genuine CD key on the bottom of the laptop but it had a dodgy copy installed.

I thought you could use any copy and aslong as the cd key was good then that was ok?

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Originally Posted by JAMAL

I thought you could use any copy and aslong as the cd key was good then that was ok?

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obviously it must have been installed with a dodgy CD key and not the one on the bottom of the laptop.

I don't believe this for one second.

Microsoft tamperinf with _your_ data?! Tad illegal that, ain't it? Even given that you have kinda nicked their stuff :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by XTR

He spoke to another bloke at Microsoft and got told that it was an illegal copy he was using and was given the nuke code which is given out to people that attempt to activate an illegal copy of windows xp. The nuke code appears to fdisk your hard disk basically deleting your primary hard drive partition.

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It's not April yet... :P

Or do you work for MS and are trying to warn people off using illegal copies? ;)

it would be possible to do - but i doubt MS would do this?

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Originally Posted by David

I don't believe this for one second.

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Me neither.

If they found out you were using an illegal copy they'd tell you, and ask you to remove it from your computer. :confused:

I'd love to have this confirmed from someone from Microsoft... This is only the story i heard from my m8 at the pub.... I have no doubt not to trust what he said was true... but i cant imagine microsoft doing such a thing.

And they hung up? Do you not think they might ask for your details so they can send the police round? Or ask you where you bought the copy from so they can catch the guy who is making money from it?

I did a memory and processor upgrade on my XP Pro machine which prompted a re-activation call.Except my genuine copy of XP did not generate any code for me to enter.

The guy on the phone basically told me I had bought/owned a pirate copy. Even when I explained that I had personally bought XP from a reputable supplier he still insisted all I could do was to go and buy a new copy as my original was duff.

He stuck with this even when I asked him to explain how I managed to get it activated when I first installed it. In the end he just told me it was hard luck and I'd have to buy a new copy, end of argument.

I hung up in disgust, re-booted my PC, clicked through the three day to activate thing, went online and activated over the net in seconds with no problem at all.

I seriously doubt that there is some nuke code built into windows, otherwise some 733t h4XX0r would've taken advantage of it a long, long time ago.

Either that or your mate accidentally mis-dialed my mum's number, as she can break anything even remotley PC related just by talking about it.