Genuine today, illegal tomorrow

Last weekend I fired up a laptop that I hadn’t used in several weeks. I knew I was going to have to spend some time playing catch-up on the laptop with Windows updates, anti-virus updates, etc. What I didn’t anticipate was Microsoft telling me my copy of Windows Vista was illegal.

Not a genuine copy

That’s right, illegal. Or as Microsoft likes to put it, “not a genuine copy”. Mind you, my copy of Windows Vista is indeed perfectly legal. I paid good money for it.

So the 43 updates that were pending for my laptop stayed pending. Microsoft wouldn’t let them download or install because my copy of Windows Vista was no longer classified as “genuine”. To add insult to injury, the background image on my laptop was branded in the lower right-hand corner with text indicating that my copy of Windows Vista was not genuine.

This one had me both frustrated and puzzled. I can only imagine what noobies would think in this situation. Would they run out and buy a new copy of Windows? Would they call Microsoft or their local tech person to resolve the problem? And what would that tech person do?

I wonder how much wasted money was spent over the weekend on technical support for this problem.

Problem resolved?

Only over morning coffee the next day did I read that Microsoft had problems over the weekend with their servers that determine whether or not a user’s copy of Windows (XP or Vista) is genuine. During this outage, many users were told, as I was, that their copy of Windows was not genuine.

Fortunately, the problem appears to have been resolved. Thank you Microsoft for once again making my copy of Windows Vista legal.