It's 2013, and Windows Activation Is Still Frustrating

Deathspawner writes "There's little that's more frustrating than being a legal customer and getting screwed over by the company you're supporting. If there's a perfect example of this, it's with Microsoft's OS and its millions of customers that have had to ring its tech support lines for activation help. Recently, a Techgage writer got bit by an issue with Windows 8 — caused by Microsoft itself — and wasn't even able to call to fix it. Microsoft has two problems to solve here: it needs online chat support (like most large companies in 2013) and it definitely needs an activation system that doesn't make things difficult for its legal customers on a too-regular basis."

Just ditch the activation.

[SuricouRaven]

It doesn't do a thing to stop pirates anyway, so what's the point of it?

Re:It shouldn't use activation at all.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There's no benefit WHATSOEVER for the customer, and it's not even made the product cheaper. All it's managed to do is piss of just about everyone, probably including the poor bastards in tech support in Microsoft.

It certainly doesn't do the customer any good(and it's extra annoying on the IT side: "C'mon Microsoft, we practically have to use a truck line to transport all the money we send you every year, we keep our licensing data squeaky clean, and we still have to dick around with activation every time we push a system image to a thousand workstations? Fuck you."); but I assume that MS didn't like the good old days when everybody who ran windows and gave a damn had a nice copy of Win2k Enterprise, VLK, sometimes with 'do not make illegal copies of this disk' scrawled in sharpie on the illegal disk copy for amusement's sake....

Re:Just ditch the activation.

[slashmydots]

That's funny because every illegal copy I've seen come into my shop is virus infested because it's missing basically all updates and at least 1 major service pack. No crack has a long useable life and never touching Windows Update is beyond stupid from a security standpoint. Then people like me refuse to work on it so you can never get your illegal PC serviced anywhere. So good luck with your half-working crack disaster.

Re:It's 2013, why are you still using Windows ?

[readingaccount]

It's not uncommon at all. Just that some people on Slashdot live in their own reality and cannot believe this can possibly be a reason.

Shit, I prefer Windows 7 over any Linux distro I've tried so far. Some people can't even COMPREHEND a preference for Windows over Linux. Which is why I hate this place sometimes and it's clearly against what I read on many other sites.