Vistablogged

Last week we were suggesting that WGA should be cut-out from Windows Vista. Well, I guess only a few can disagree with this statement. This weekend, problems were reported with the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) validation server resulting in milions of users unable to validate their copy of Windows Vista.

Many legal users saw error messages appearing on their screen saying they might be ‘victim of software counterfeiting‘, actually meaning they might be using a illegal copy. Many users saw their Aero interface get disabled, while they owned a legal Windows Vista copy and did that could have caused this.

Phil would not sleep untill it was solved…

As you can read here, a microsoft worker called Phil said he would not sleep untill the problems with WGA were resolved again. Some time later Phil reported on the forums that a solution was found, and that users could validate their copy of Windows Vista again to regain full functionality.

OEM versions

Windows Vista OEM users were left out of this troublesome matter, because Windows Vista OEM versions don’t do regulary check-ups with the WGA server on for example startup. Well, that makes 1-0 for the OEM versions!

WGA server

Nobody from outside Microsoft exactly knows how the WGA server is really connected to the internet, but it seems that it was not correctly installed for it’s important task. The fact that without this server milions of Windows Vista users are left stuck with a less then sufficiënt OS, should have made Microsoft secure it’s WGA server so that it would be nearly impossible to have errors.

Redundancy, multiple datacenters and geologic spreading are offcourse keywords in this matter. Microsoft does have the budget and possibilities to accomplish total redundancy, so I am left wondering why the WGA server could be down for 2 days.