WGA News: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Those of you who read my posts at RealTechNews know I wrote about both WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) and RemoveWGA recently.  Responding to criticism of its new WGA Notifications program, Microsoft has made some changes to the software and released a new version. The updated software no longer checks in every time the PC boots. They have also given guidelines to remove the application, which had previously been uninstallable and let to development of such utilities as RemoveWGA.

The new version of Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) Notifications program now no longer checks a server-side configuration of a user’s version of Windows every time the user logs on to see if it is a valid copy of Windows. Instead, it periodically checks to see if the user’s copy is genuine.

"Our customers have told us that they were disappointed with their WGA Notifications experience, and we have made an effort to improve that with this update," the company said in an e-mailed statement through its public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. Source: PC World

Define periodically for me. At the same time, however, Ed Bott at ZDNet Blogs has some interesting rumors / speculations about the possible future of WGA.  Since, according to an email from Microsoft, sent to Ed, customers may someday be required to install WGA Notifications, Ed has posited that Microsoft may someday use WGA Notifications to prevent PCs with suspected pirated copies from booting.  All well and good, as I believe Microsoft should get its $$$, but I also know all software has bugs.

From ZDNet Blogs and Ed’s post, an example of problems with WGA Notifications so far:

I purchased a SEALED OEM copy of XP Professional. WGA said the license key was already used. I called MS and they said I should uninstall and buy another copy. I told them I wasn’t made of money and hung-up.

All it takes is one example to make me worry.  Of course, this is all truly speculation, and I haven’t seen any problems.  On the other hand, I only ran it for a few days before discovering (and running) RemoveWGA.

Tags: Windows, Security, WGA

Tech Support Asleep at the Switch? Why Does This Not Surprise Me?

Sometimes I’ve wondered just how, ahem, well-trained some tech support personnedl are, especially when I seem to have to explain everything to them, about 5 times, and make sure they understand that as a computer professional, most of their script I’ve already tried.  But at least, on the phone, they have been awake (so far).  Reports (and a video on this site) indicate that a Comcast repairman fell asleep while on a call.

The video is one of several recent examples of angered customers taping their interactions with customer service, then putting the experience online.

The Comcast video, in particular, struck a nerve. In it, the repairman, in a red golf shirt and short pants, has his head back in full snore and a laptop perched on his knee.
Source: IHT

It’s to laugh, but it doesn’t totally surprise me.  On the other hand, it does make me wonder if I really want to switch from AT&T DSL to Comcast.

Cell Phones Excite Me … Or At Least My Brain

Technophile that I am, I love new things.  However, I usually don’t change cell phone hardware casually (as opposed to gaming PC hardware).  Cell phone hardware doesn’t excite me that much.  Italian researchers have run a study in which volunteers tried a GSM phone and determined that the part of the motor cortex next to where the phone was held showed "excitability".  Of course, this was a small test (15 volunteers) and excitement doesn’t necessarily mean harm.

What I’d really like to see is a test like this for Bluetooth headsets.  I don’t typically hold a phone up to my head, since I use a PPC Phone, but I use a headset all the time.

Aagh (to City of Heroes Fans) … NCSoft Lays Off 25%

Yeah, it’s the only game I’ve gotten into for quite some time. City of Heroes. And on Friday NCSoft announced that 70 of 300 people were being laid off from the Austin site. According to sites such as Gamasutra, these layoffs included 90% of the Tech Support staff. Great. It was hard enough to get help if a villain was stuck in a floor or wall. Now it’ll be impossible.

WinFS Dropped

Expected to be an add-on to Vista, and the subject of presentations at TechEd last week, WinFS has been axed. The idea of WinFS was to get away from the current file system, where files were stored in a hierarchical system of folders, but to have Windows present files based on the request. For example, want to distribute pictures on a CD? Windows would give you a list of JPGs and GIFs.

This isn’t really a surprise, as it was originally part of Vista but was cut in 2004 … then resurrected as an add-on last August.

Stop Calling Home, WGA

Even though I didn’t really see a problem with the WGA Notification Program, I also didn’t see, after my system was checked for bogus OSes and determined to be OK (all my OSes are legitimate), that it should run and phone home to Microsoft. Thus, I was really happy to find RemoveWGA. You can find my article and experiences at RTN, where I wrote about them.

Problems w/ nVidia’s 91.31 Drivers

This week nVidia released their 91.31 drivers. The drivers offer a totally changed UI, and supposedly offer performance improvements (and based on published benchmarks, they do). But when I installed the drivers on my non-SLI laptop, I kept getting the error: “SLI Multi-GPU Rendering has been disabled” every time I boot. Excuse me, I don’t have SLI, so stop bugging me.

The solution is: set the registry key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak]
“NvCplEnableMultiGPUConfigurationPage”=dword:0

Viola. But how they let this out into the field with this really annoying bug is beyond me.

Also, you can’t stop the System Tray icon from starting. You used to be able to shut this down from the View menu. If the nVidia Control Panel is running, though, it re-enables the app when it exits. So … I renamed nvmctray.dll in c:\Windows\System32 to nvmctray.dll.org. This is the DLL that runs the system tray icon. Next time it booted, the app wasn’t running. I then ran MSCONFIG and disabled the RUNDLL32 command that started nvmctray.dll. Reboot. No tray icon.

‘Course if I even run the nVidia Control Panel for any reason, I’ll have to do it all over again, but …

Time for Me to Switch from DSL?

With the changes to AT&T’s privacy policy, which basically says, your data is our data, is it finally time for me to change to cable modem service?

 

Why haven’t I changed to this point?  I mean, cable modem service is faster.

 

a) When I had cable TV, it was horrible.  Full of ghosts. I’m worried that this is how my data would show up.  Full of errors.

b) The cost.  DSL is far cheaper, and since I have satellite, I would have to pay an extra $15 to Comcast.

c) inertia.  I’d have to change my setup.  However, since I changed my setup slightly anyway to use the DSL modem to login to the service and act as a DHCP server, it’s not that big a change.

 

Plus, with my DSL service, I’ve always had problems with frequent disconnects, where the DSL modem disconnects and has to reconnect.  I’m hoping this won’t happen with cable.

 

So, what are my plans?  Right now, my plan is, since my contract with AT&T ends in early August, to get Comcast to install in Mid-July.  Since there’s no contract required, I can always drop the service if I want.  And that’s what I’ve decided to do.  For sure this year (since I planned to switch two years ago and didn’t).  More on this later.

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