I was just notified by Windows Genuine Advantage that I may have a pirated copy of Windows. Now, this is enough to make most people feel a bit nervous, but it really worried me. The reason is because it was on a system using our church volume license.
I have heard of several people who had Windows XP Pro installed by a computer shop who said they had a license to install on as many systems as they needed to. This is another way of saying they are pirating. Sure you can use the volume license on lots of machines, but you can bet that Microsoft does not mean that you can just stick it on any and every machine you come across. One of the things Windows Genuine Advantage does is look at your computer and see if it has one of the many codes that has been carried along by pirates.
So, I am looking at a system running the church volume license and my first thought was “Oh, [mild expletive]!” (Would you believe that I actually thought [mild expletive], square brackets and all? Didn’t think so.) I thought that maybe someone has pirated on our license and we are going to have to go through the sausage grinder to fix this all.
Now for the special details. The new system wasn’t actually new and wasn’t actually a real system. It was a VirtualPC set up in July and forgotten about. I went back in to test something out and after an upgrade the warnings popped up. I hoped it had something to do with the Virtual Hard Drive having actually been started on a very different system and now it is coming back to life with 700MB of RAM rather than the 256 allocated before.
The good news is that it was all just a botched confirmation, and after using the tips on this page:Windows Genuine Advantage Error, everything went back to normal.
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