Windows Vista: October 2006 Archives

Some days just getting a straight answer is hard enough.  ArsTechnica went to talk to Microsoft about Vista's activation policy and got a slightly different story than the one I reported here before.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars Technica that "the hardware tolerance of product activation for Windows Vista has been improved and is more flexible than that for Windows XP," indicating that re-activations caused by minor changes to a PC should be less common.  "We believe these improvements will better accommodate the needs of our PC enthusiast customers," the spokesperson said.

Microsoft told Ars Technica that SPP monitors the system and measures changes against the original hardware configuration of the PC in an attempt to determine if the software has been moved to a new device. SPP uses an undisclosed algorithm to to track changes, and it remains unclear how the algorithm assesses different hardware changes. The spokesperson reiterated the company's view that Vista's hardware tolerance is more flexible than before. As to the issue of multiple re-activations, Microsoft is standing behind the language of its licenses.

... For those reading between the lines, Microsoft's response is telling. The option of seeking remediation through Microsoft support is a good sign that the company has left a giant safety net in place, much as they did with Windows XP.

What's most frustrating is that Microsoft could clear up all of this bewilderment by simply having one of their people step up to the plate and speak out on their own.  I suspect the reason this hasn't happened is because they're trying to see just how well this new policy plays out once it's actually live, instead of making a full commitment to something they can't support.

I suspect the only way we're going to find out what the real deal is is by waiting for the final release to drop, and then torture-testing the thing on our own.  But if they have, indeed, relaxed the activation thresholds enough that people can swap motherboards without being forced to shell out for a whole new license, that's worthwhile.

... similar concerns over hardware upgrades surfaced before Windows XP launched. The reality since that launch has been far less dramatic than many commentators predicted. In our extensive experience with re-activations caused by hardware changes, the outcome experienced most often amounts to this: we had to use Microsoft's automated phone system to retrieve a new activation code. No money changed hands. On average, the calls took less than five minutes.

In the entire time I've been working with XP, I've run afoul of PA exactly twice, and both times it was because I did something unbelievably stupid.  (I know that other people have not had the same track record, but I can only speak for myself -- and some of the things other people do with their PCs are definitely at least as stupid as anything I've done.)

[This spokesperson for Microsoft, by the way, has gone completely unnamed.]

Some possible clarification about the Vista license-activation deal:

A Microsoft spokesman from the Licensing Dept told bit-tech that ... Windows Vista will not require a system re-activation unless the hard drive and one other component is changed. This means that enthusiasts will be able to swap CPUs, memory and graphics cards out without any worry about having to re-activate with MS, either on the internet or by phone.

Should you change the hard drive and another piece of hardware - for example for a major upgrade such as a motherboard change that requires a re-installation - Microsoft will allow you to re-activate up to 10 times. You will not, however, be able to have more than one machine activated concurrently.

I've got no firsthand confirmation directly from MS about any of this, but this actually sounds better than what currently exists with XP.  Anyone who goes over the 10-activation limit (and I don't even see enthusiasts having this problem) can also phone in an activation, which tends to be pretty painless.  (You can bet someone is going to try, just to see what happens.)

(Bear in mind, I'm not positive if what they are talking about is the final, end-user license for Vista or just the licensing that's in place now for RC testers, but the wording sounds a lot like it's for the real deal.)

Also, I am not sure if making a disk image from one drive to another counts as a new hard drive, though.  My experiences has shown that it doesn't.  When I imaged my XP system drive to a new hard drive, I checked the product activation counters with XPInfo and found that the HD counter had not changed.  I suspect the HD counter is derived from the partition serial number and not the drive hardware itself, but I don't know if that's the same in Vista.  (On a whim, I ran XPInfo on Vista RC1 after activating it, and got an error message -- apparently the APIs used to obtain a computer's PA data have changed since XP.)

Like many other key functions in Vista, the way users access networking and network resources has also been reworked.  The vast majority of networking functions are now consolidated in one place instead of being spread out over a number of different dialogs.  The new networking interface actually seems patterned after something we've seen in XP Service Packs 1 and 2: the Security Center.

However, I found a few gotchas that are worth noting -- mostly in the way Vista now handles certain kinds of file and folder sharing.  I'm hoping this is a RC1 issue and not something we see in the finished product.  But let's start with the good stuff, because the good stuff really is very good.

Among the many, many changes made to Windows Vista, the one that's drawn the most attention is User Account Control, or UAC for short.  In this article I'm going to talk about UAC as it'll affect someone who's come in from XP, and may be surprised to find that things they did before without consequence are now being interrupted.

PC World has spoken to Microsoft about the whole issue of whether or not it's possible to move a Vista license more than once.  The official word is about what you'd expect.

Some of the things in this article made me flinch.

When Windows Vista is available, consumers will be able to transfer the OS license they purchase to only one machine other than the one for which they originally buy Vista, says Shanen Boettcher, a Windows general manager at Microsoft. He says Microsoft thinks the change makes sense because "lifetimes for PCs are getting longer." Most likely, a user will not need to transfer an OS license to more than one computer during the time that OS is the latest one available, Boettcher says.

"It's a fit for what most customers do," he says. Boettcher adds that XP did not have a specific limit for the number of times the license was transferable, but that Microsoft wanted to be "specific" about transfer rights with Vista.

[Side note: Most of the PCs I own have had a lifespan of about three years, including notebooks.  I don't know if that's reflective of the experiences of most users, though.]

I'm going to drill down as far as I can to the heart of the problem.  The way I see it, there are three issues here:

1. Windows users are upset because they can't simply take a Windows license with them from computer to computer with impugnity; they want to know that they have that measure of freedom to do so if they need to.  [Devil's advocate: Windows is licensed by machine and not by user, and the vast majority of the Windows licenses sold are tied to a specific computer as a pre-load.]
2. People who tinker with their machines and re-image them are going to be punished.  [Devil's advocate: The hardware check thresholds for Vista have apparently been loosened a bit in the light of this new restriction, so people who are legitimately binding Vista to one machine with regular hardware upgrades may not have it any worse than they do now.]
3. This will not inhibit piracy in the slightest, because the pirates who want copies of Windows will get them by any means.  [Devil's advocate: We'll see how the new antipiracy measures play out in the real world -- which, admittedly, includes how broadly those restrictions will inconvenience regular users.]

One comment in the PC Today forums was both funny and telling: "Well, I was considering purchasing a copy of Vista Ultimate when it comes out but since I upgrade components in my PC as often as I change my shorts, I will now have to resort to obtaining a "free" version of the OS since it's not a fit for what I do. What a joke to have to permanently bind my $400 copy of Vista to every 2nd motherboard."

Like I was about Product Activation itself, I'm now of two minds once again.  In principle, I hate this idea.  In practice, it's manageable.  And I suspect it'll drive away another flock of people towards open-source ... although my own dalliances with Linux essentially involved trading the onus of Product Activation and the cost of the OS for a raft of other problems that were about as inhibitory towards my work habits, if not more so.

When the final version drops, I'm going to be in touch with some folks who do regular hardware upgrades, and report back on their experiences with it.  As a side note, I suspect the fellow who swaps motherboards regularly could probably work around the problem with phone activation ... but, again, he really shouldn't have to.  Folks like that may be a minority, but they're a vocal minority, and they have a tendency to get other people to jump ship with them.

Microsoft has caved on other things before.  Maybe if we put enough pressure on them and insist that the transfer option be limited to OEM copies of Vista only (i.e., preloads, not OTC editions), it would make sense.  But as it stands, this rule is making too many enemies.

[Postscript: Koroush Ghazi of www.tweakguides.com has a very nice discussion of the subject over at Paul Thurrott's SuperSite -- it's in essence a rebuttal to Paul's own piece on the issue.]

If there's one thing I've consistently hated about Windows, it's the lack of a good backup and restore solution.  Sure, there's the NTBACKUP tool, but it doesn't let you create a full-system backup you can restore to "bare metal": you have to have a working Windows installation to use it, which kind of obviates the point if your system's toast.

Someone at Microsoft was thinking, though, and one of the Vista features that has gladdened my heart to see is the ability to not just back up files and folders, but to back up and restore a whole system from scratch.  XP users who have had to rely on copying files by hand, struggling with NTBACKUP, working with freeware that doesn't cover all the bases or shelling out cash for an actual third-party backup solution are going to love this.  I know I do.

Incidentally, our old friend System Restore is still here, and in much the same condition, but for the time being I'll talk in detail about the new backup/restore functions; a discussion of System Restore can wait for another article.

Or: The First Step Off The Deep End

Well, last night I went and did it.  I installed Windows Vista RC1, Build 5600, on my notebook computer -- after making a full partition image, just to be safe.  The whole install process -- which I did from a clean boot, no upgrade -- took about an hour, and when it was done I sat down and got my first close look at the way Vista works.  I know there have been some changes since RC1 was released (most notably to the annoying black of the Taskbar), but I figured enough has been nailed down that I can at least try to start using the OS provisionally.

What I'd like to do is publish a series of articles that talk about some of the new things in Vista, but from the point of view of an existing Windows user.  A lot of other people have talked about Aero Glass and the security features, but I'd like to tackle this from the perspective of someone who has been using XP for a long time and is now, suddenly, a Vista user.  What do they see, and what will they do?  I figured I'd be as good a guinea pig as most people.

A couple of days ago I posted a link to Ed Bott's blog in which he pointed a finger at a very worrisome aspect of Windows Vista's licensing that had a lot of people in a tizzy.  It seemed to imply that you couldn't move a copy of Vista more than once from a given machine.  I didn't like the sound of that, but at the same time I could see how it was a misreading of a statement that wasn't very well-worded to begin with.  I slept on it, re-read it, and saw all the more how it could have been misread.

Now Paul Thurott has attempted to explain everything.  He claims the the contractual conditions in the new EULA are really no different from what they were in XP -- and that, in XP, we didn't really have the freedom to move licenses as freely as we thought we did.  Well, did we?  His claim is that the vast majority of XP licenses are not over-the-counter boxed editions, but preinstalls tied to a given machine.  The people who do have a machine failure and need to move to a whole new machine have always had the option of activating by phone (which I've done myself as a pre-emptive measure at one point).

His defense of this whole matter boils down to two things:

1) Most people who get Vista will get it with a new computer, which cannot be transferred anyway.

2) If you buy Vista over-the-counter and need to move it more than once, you do what you did with XP: call support.

(For the record, I have one friend who did exactly that and claims he was treated with great hostility and suspicion, but I wonder how much of that may simply have been that they were simply asking him what had happened, and he felt like he had to provide them with every last detail, which is generally not the case.  My point being that few people are inclined to phone tech support to do something they feel should be a hands-off circumstance.)

However, let me play devil's advocate for the moment.  The number of times I have had to move a given copy of Windows to a completely different computer I could probably count on one hand.  Notice I said move and not reinstall; the two are not handled the same way.  If you reinstall Windows on a piece of hardware that it was already activated on (including incremental changes, remember the 120-day device-change threshold?), that's not moving anything.

So how does this affect the hardcore PC geeks who tear down and rebuild constantly?  Thurrott further claims the algorithm in Vista that determines the number of hardware changes to watch for to consider the machine different has actually been relaxed a bit.  I don't have details on how it's been relaxed; I'd like to scare those up as soon as possible and see for my self what they are.

I should also note that the people who object to all of this on principle -- I was and to a degree still am one of them myself -- are simply not going to be most of the people using Windows, and are not going to use Windows in the ways that most other folks are.  I think we forget this a little too easily, and while it's good to remain vigilant of changes like this, it's not good to lose perspective.  We don't like restrictive licensing agreements because many of us have tasted life on the other side of the Windows fence, but unless someone can go and prove in court that EULAs like this are not legal, or constitute an abuse of monopoly, we either use Windows as it is or not at all.

My complaint is this: If the XP EULA didn't allow moving from more than one machine, why didn't it say that in the first place?  Perhaps I'm griping needlessly at this point, but I'm finding I miss the days of Borland's old-school software licenses (the kind that came with products like Turbo Pascal), which were spelled out in the clearest and most unambiguous language possible and came with plenty of examples.  I'm frankly more worried about WGA being an inhibitor to Vista's usefulness than the EULA, but this is certainly not helping matters any.

I'll see how much of an obstacle Product Activation and WGA are with my own hardware.  I would like to think it won't be any worse than it is now, but ... I worry.  A bit.

I slept on last night's Windows licensing issue, and when I woke up in the morning, I went back and re-read the licensing terms with a clear(er) head.  I have the suspicion that what's going on here is another case of a badly-worded EULA, rather than Microsoft being deadly greedly.

Let's look at that wording again. 

The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the “licensed device.”

I am beginning to suspect what they mean is not that you can only move the license to one other machine, but that you can only move it once from the original machine.  In other words, you can only move it to one other machine from that machine, not five others, with a similar condition imposed on each successive machine.  In short, this is ostensibly no different from the way XP works now; the wording just seems to be a little more prone to misinterpretation.  So maybe this is a tempest in a thermos, to coin a phrase.

What I find amazing is how a company of Microsoft's size and relative wealth can write an EULA that's this fuzzy.  Those who are of a more paranoid stripe would probably be inclined to say that it's on purpose, but I'm starting to learn my lesson about assuming the worst each time.  (There are other elements in the licensing agreement that had people in a tizzy, like a clause which was horribly misquoted and which people believed to mean that you couldn't use an .ISO disc image in anything other than Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.)

I am, however, still going to wait for some official clarification on this issue.

Ed Bott (who brought attention to this the first time) has also chimed in about something else that's actually a giant boon: If you have a copy of Vista, you can run the same copy of Vista within it as a VM with no licensing penalty.  This is a great idea.  For a guy like me, who's constantly using VMs to do testing-and-teardown work, it means one less thing to worry about.  Microsoft actually has done some very good things with the way they've handled licensing for VMs, so it's nice to see them continue to do so on the desktop.

The problem with Vista is ... well, there's about 200 ways that sentence could be completed, now, couldn't there?  Let's add another one to the mix.

Ed Bott of ZDNet is reporting that one of the new licensing stipulations with Windows Vista is that you are no longer allowed to move an individual copy of Vista from one machine to another indefinitely.  At least, that's what the wording in the new EULA would have us believe:

15. REASSIGN TO ANOTHER DEVICE.

a. Software Other than Windows Anytime Upgrade. The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the “licensed device.”

b. Windows Anytime Upgrade Software. The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time, but only if the license terms of the software you upgraded from allows reassignment.

Similar rules are in section 16 of the EULA, regarding transfer to a third party.

Now maybe this is just very bad wording.  Perhaps all they are implying is that you only have the right to move a given copy to one other machine, and then you can only move that one copy to one other machine, and so on.  In other words, you can't move it to five other machines.

But somehow I doubt that.  And what's most worrisome about this particular stipulation is how it would affect people who are constantly tearing down and rebuilding; they wouldn't be able to use Vista reliably at all.  Also, what about folks who upgrade continuously and don't stay with one hardware profile for any given time?

Unless Microsoft comes out and clarifies this particular issue a little more aggressively, I'm going to have a real hard time seeing this as being anything other than disgustingly unfair.  Maybe it's fine for people whose copy of the OS is tied to the machine they bought it on and replace both PC and OS at the same time, but those of us who don't fit that profile are going to be -- and already are -- spitting mad.

I'll keep you all posted with any developments on this issue, but I suspect it's going to be a real deal-breaker for me.

My colleague Scot Finnie has been giving Windows Vista a very detailed and extremely critical (as in, he's found fault with things) shakedown ever since the first builds appeared for public consumption.  With the final release candidate looming, it's about time I got my hands on it, turned it upside down and emptied its pockets to see what falls out.  The only reason I haven't done this sooner is resources: I don't have a spare machine to do testing on (yet), and I really wanted to not run the risk of trashing my production system on something that has been explicitly branded a beta.

I've gathered advice about the installation process from other folks who have suffered through it, though, and here are a few things I plan to take to heart:

1. Don't upgrade.  Meaning, don't upgrade an existing installation of Windows.  Install clean.  You will drastically minimize the number of variables involved, and you'll be able to systematically determine what works in a clean install vs. what doesn't.  Yes, this means more headache spread out over more time, but it also means a clearer picture of why things might work or not work.
2. Don't install with anything that doesn't absolutely have to be there.  Unplug everything you don't need to get Windows running before the install; you'll save a lot of time on the hardware detection process, and you'll be able to add hardware progressively and see what works and what doesn't.  Hardware drivers are still a big missing piece of the Vista puzzle, and from what I can tell there will be many things that will simply not work, period.  My scanner, for instance (a Canon consumer-level item) isn't going to be supported at all, so I either have to plug it into an existing XP system or buy a whole new one.  The former is workable; the latter is absolutely not happening right now.
3. Don't install on a drive with an existing Windows installation.  Even if you're doing a parallel install, don't do this.  I have a separate drive that I've reserved for Vista, which I will boot to entirely apart from XP.  (At this point I'm even leery of having Vista examine my existing non-boot drives until I can determine that it doesn't create incompatibilities with earlier versions of Windows in NTFS.  Yes, I'm probably being paranoid, but You Never Know...)
4. Don't trust production work to it for the time being.  I'm even leery of doing so after the initial gold release, if only because I need to keep my main system an XP system for the time being, just for the sake of my work.  Maybe after the first 6-8 months I'll be dual-booting consistently (or using Virtual PC for backwards compatibility, etc.), but I don't plan on going whole-hog anytime soon.

Old habits are hard to break, and I hope the best thing about Vista is that it gives me a bunch of solid, compelling reasons to leave XP behind.  Maybe not immediately, but in time.  And I'm patient.