10-09-2007, 09:40 AM

I went from 2 gigs ram to 4 gigs in my Alienware laptop today (see sig), and Vista Ultimate 64 bit (System builders, OEM, version from New Egg) "deactivated" and gave me that "You have 3 days to activate windows or it will stop working..." error message.

So, of course, I click Activate Windows, use the on line option, and I get another error message saying "This version of windows has already been activated on another PC... click here to buy a new copy of Windows". Can you believe that crap??!!

So, I try several more times, get the same error, and then I try the "activate with the telephone option", in lieu of calling customer support for 59 bucks.

A screen pops up with a 1-800 number to call, and a long code of numbers generated. I call the number, and was routed to somewhere in India. The woman asked me for the numbers on my screen, which i read, and she then said that my product key has already been activated on another computer. I said, "no, it is my same computer, I just added more ram." Finally, she reads me a string of numbers to input into the window, and then wala, my Vista Ultimate 64 bit activated again.

What a joke. Suppose I want to benchmark my computer with 2 gigs vs 4 gigs. Am I going to have to go through this each time? Suppose my laptop gets banged around a bit, and one ram dimm comes loose, so the next time I boot it, it has 2 gigs instead of 4. Same freaking hassle. Microsoft really needs to loosen this up.

And they wonder why guys have the nerve to pirate and hack their OS...

Sorry for the rant.

10-09-2007, 09:55 AM

Yet another reason I'm happy I gave up my Vista machine for an iMac...

Sorry to hear about all your troubles. Glad to hear they took care of it for you.

Sean

10-09-2007, 10:28 AM

I'd believe it if it was a processor or a new mainboard, but RAM? Heck adding RAM is probably what every Vista user needs to do to gain some functionality. If it was my laptop and I didn't need Vista for anything that only works on it I would have just put some x64 flavor of Linux on it or maybe dual boot XP Pro/Linux. It probably would run about a million times faster anyway!

That said I have yet to need Vista for anything since on my both my MBP and desktops i'm either on OS X or Linux about 85% of the time and XP for some games I have. I had Vista on a desktop comp of mine w/ 2GB of RAM and on a fresh install it used half of the RAM at boot, so that lasted about two days, but I suppose we do have to bear in mind when XP came out it must have seemed like a big deal that 512mb was really what you needed to make it run smooth (though it still works fine on 256mb or so). By the time Vista gets as old as XP is now, the average computer probably will have more than 4GB of RAM, probably closer to 8GB and x64 would be the standard so using a gig of RAM on boot wouldn't be such a big deal (but still, that list of random services on start up is huge).