Posted on 10/27/2006 4:40:23 PM PDT by Swordmaker
October 27, 2006 (IDG News Service) -- Microsoft Corp. yesterday attempted to clear up confusion over licensing of Windows Vista for power users who rebuild their PCs on a regular basis. But the answer from the software vendor did little to placate some users, who are still upset about Microsoft's one-machine transfer policy for Vista.
According to Microsoft spokesman Mike Burk, Microsoft users who frequently change the hardware configuration of the system running Vista might fail Vista's new Software Protection Platform software-validation feature more than once. If they did, they would be required to purchase an additional license or use Microsoft's support services to activate Vista on a newly configured machine.
In an e-mail to the IDG News Service, Burk said Microsoft's product-activation process for Vista compares information from the initial validation -- which includes the hardware configuration of the device -- against the new configuration to transfer the license to a new piece of hardware.
The process is an extension of Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program, which is designed to fight software piracy. It uses an algorithm to help assess whether the software is installed on the same device, and validation of the software will fail if it detects a "substantially different hardware configuration," he said.
At that point, a customer can use the one-time reassignment of the license that comes with the purchase of Vista to transfer the license to a new hardware configuration. However, if after a user does this, he "again exceeds the tolerance for updated components, the customer can either purchase an additional license or seek remediation through Microsoft's support services," Burk says.
He said that the situation is similar to what many XP power users experience today and that Microsoft has improved the algorithm used to determine what hardware configuration changes constitute a new device.
"The bottom line is that the hardware tolerance of product activation for Windows Vista has been improved and is more flexible than that for Windows XP," Burk said. "We believe these improvements will better accommodate the needs of our PC enthusiast customers."
Mark Smith, a Windows user who has his own business developing custom data-acquisition and analysis packages for industrial applications, disagreed with Burk's assessment.
"I have never heard of an XP user having to use Microsoft's remediation service to activate the software because they transferred to a new machine. Did I miss something?" he said in an e-mail to the IDG News Service.
Smith said the licensing debacle and the new required WGA validation are reasons enough not to upgrade to Vista until "absolutely forced to."
"[Vista] has nothing that creates an overriding desire to upgrade, and with WGA, there is a strong disincentive," he said. "All recent computers that I've purchased came with XP, and I've had no reason or need to have Microsoft revalidate that they are genuine. To upgrade to Vista and face possible service interruptions if Microsoft incorrectly decides that a valid copy is not genuine is ridiculous, to say the least."
After learning of Microsoft's explanation, Don Smutny, a software developer for a large Midwestern technology company, said he was still unsure of what might happen in some instances when he switches components out of PCs that have Vista licenses.
"I would like to know if there is still a 'timer' involved in determining whether or not I would have to call Microsoft and explain to them that changing my motherboard is not the same thing as installing Vista on a new PC," he said. "With XP, you can make most hardware changes without needing to reactivate the OS, as long as those changes had somewhere between 30 to 45 days between them."
He said if Vista allows for the same type of staggered hardware upgrading, then he can live with the new licensing. However, "if there is no 'timer reset' mechanism built into the hardware check, then I think Microsoft still has some work to do."
User concerns over Vista licensing surfaced two weeks ago when it was disclosed that Microsoft is limiting the number of machines to which users can transfer Windows Vista licenses as part of licensing changes to the Windows client operating systems. Consumers who buy Vista licenses separate from hardware will be able to transfer the operating system license they purchase to only one machine other than the one for which they originally bought Vista.
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DirectX 10, Support for Robson(fast boot times on laptops soon) and others.
DirectX 10...and so it ends!
There are troubled times ahead. Through one bold move, Microsoft has decided that it will not support, the already too “old” DirectX 9, not to mention DirectX 8 or any of the previous versions. But... it appears to be some logic hidden somewhere.
The new DirectX will not be named Windows Graphic Foundation (WGF) as it was planned and will remain at the old name, as in DirectX 10. It will be released with their brand new operating system Vista. This news API will be composed of new and faster dynamic link libraries (DLLs) and will run much faster (so they say).
Microsoft has decided that backward compatibly with DirectX 9,8,7 isn't really necessary as there will probably will be even less compatible with Vista.
Even so, dear Microsoft hasn't totally forgotten us. Some sort of “compatibility” will be available through a software layer (probably some emulation) which will have its price in system resources, as it will run much slower. The good news is that DirectX 10 will relieve some of the burden on the CPU.
And of course it will have support for the next generation of Pixel Shaders 4.0, although it will probably surface before even Vista's release due to the rapid development of graphic cards.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/DirectX-10-and-so-it-ends-7762.shtml
Latest from Ars Technica, who called Microsoft (duh, whoda thunk of that?), says basically that Vista has a hardware-change algorithm just like XP had, although apparently a bit smarter.
If it triggers (say you put in a new mobo), it will still run, counting as one transfer. You will have to call Microsoft support to keep running if you trigger it again, but reports say MS support is has been pretty lenient about that in the past with XP. Previously the general number of reactivations allowed through support was 10, but Microsoft isn't saying how many this time.
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