windows users: be warned

Late last night at a Microsoft server farm somewhere,  a tech looked at the power cord laying on the floor and said, “Hey, who unplugged this?” His buddy on the lateshift replied, “Oh, that was me. I needed a place to plug in the coffee maker.”

Apparently the Windows Genuine Advantage crisis has now been rectified. You may update at will.

 

If you are a windows user like me, this is something you should know:

 

Microsoft is having some sort of major melt down of its Windows Genuine Advantage verification service. The biggest headache for those of us who are stuck with use windows is that if you try to install any software that demands verification by WGA, your computer could get tagged as having an invalid copy of windows. That could be bad.

Here’s what ARS has to say…

If you use Windows, do your best to avoid anything that requires a ping to WGA. That means you should stay away from patches and add-ons until the coast is clear. WGA will not reach out across the Internet and deactivate your copy of Windows, but you should avoid talking to a WGA server for any reason.

For those of you doing installations and upgrades this weekend, we recommend that you avoid activation at this time. Remember that you can run Windows legally for 30 days without activating.

If you attempt a validation and it fails, your install may be marked as non-genuine, which could lead to several annoyances. First things first, do not reboot a Windows machine that has been marked as non-genuine. Once you do so, you will lose functionality and the Aero interface. It would be best to wait until this problem has been resolved.

Ick. 

The Aero interface for those of you who (like me) are clueless, is the graphical interface for Windows Vista.

I’m not altogether certain that this outage affects XP users, but I’m not taking any chances. I’ve turned off my Automatic Updates service until the coast is clear.

If any of you readers with a higher Geek IQ than myself want to chime in/correct me/vent at me regarding this situation, please use the comments and I’ll update this post accordingly.

And as for all you Mac users: don’t even start.