Got a pirated copy of XP? Prepare for the nag flood.
Windows Vista was released with a powerful deterrent to piracy, a persistent version of WGA. It was so successful in protecting the OS that even valid customers had a hard time with the system that Microsoft decided to drop this practice on Service Pack 1. This anti-piracy feature, unless Vista was properly activated, it would drop to a reduced functionality mode that disabled everything save for the browser that only allows you to go online to authenticate your OS or buy it.
When a lot of Genuine Vista users found themselves locked out of their systems, Microsoft opted to roll out a less intrusive version of WGA that the background turned black and nagging boxes warned you that you “might be a victim of software piracy”.
Less lockout but still an annoyance.
With it’s success (or failure depending on how you look at it) Microsoft is going to bring this feature to Windows XP with a new version of the Windows Genuine Advantage.
From the WGA blog:
With this update to WGA Notifications in Windows XP, we’ve implemented a couple of related features that draw on the notifications experience we designed for Windows Vista SP1. After installing this version of WGA Notifications on a copy of Windows XP that fails the validation, most users will discover on their next logon that their desktop has changed to a plain black background from whatever was there previously (see below).
The desktop background can be reset to anything else in the usual ways, but every 60 minutes it will change back to the plain black background. This will continue to happen until that copy of Windows is genuine.
Also, the user will see the addition of what we call the “persistent desktop notification.” This notification is similar to a watermark but works a bit differently. The image (see below) appears over the system tray and is non-interactive in the sense that you can’t click on it or do anything to it.
The new WGA will only come to XP Professional since, by the numbers, it’s the most pirated version of the OS. If you use XP Home or Media Center Edition, you won’t get this new release of WGA, for now that is. It will take several months before all XP Pro users have the new WGA.
Note that if you’re on XP Professional and your try to download anything from the Microsoft Download site, the first thing you’ll get is a notification that you need to download the new WGA and install it before proceeding.
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