Isolationism

…or:

Why I Won’t Be Buying Vista Or Any Software From Microsoft Ever Again

I’ve had a frustrating couple of days trying to get my old copy of Windows XP up and running inside the free VMWare Player package using Ubuntu as the host operating system; getting the player up and running was easy; I just marked the package for installation in Synaptic and a couple minutes later it was ready to run.

First Attempt: VMWare Player

VMWare Player, in case you’re curious, is capable of playing virtual machines that have already been created elsewhere, but is unable to create its own. Thanks to online services like EasyVMX!, creating a virtual machine for use in VMWare Player is pretty quick and easy.

Unfortunately, my VMWare Player experience wasn’t a bed of roses. While my installation went fine, after several reboots, Windows was suddenly taking hours to load, grinding away continuously at my hard drive and effectively reducing the entire host machine to a lump of useless metal. After digging around for an evening and trying everything I could think of to fix the machine, I stumbled across a post in the Ubuntu forums about getting the VMWare Server package to run under Ubuntu to host Windows XP just as I was trying to do with VMWare Player. VMWare Server is also free, although you do have to provide VMWare with some contact information to get them to issue you a serial number.

Second Attempt: VMWare Server

Well, I was desperate—and frankly, VMWare Server is so much nicer than VMWare Player, as it has a full-featured GUI, and the Ubuntu Forums thread was over 50 pages long, so I figured this must be working for a bunch of people. To provide a little extra insurance that things run better this time, I moved my virtual drives to a separate hard disk entirely onto a freshly formatted XFS partition.

The first boot made it clear that things were running better under VMWare Server than they ever did in Player. Success! However, my celebration was to be short lived.

Windows Product Activation

I had hit a roadblock—Windows was convinced I was up to something sneaky and had moved my installation to a totally different piece of hardware. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth—It was exactly the same physical hardware that I had just successfully activated Windows on less than a day earlier—but of course, Windows doesn’t know it’s running on that hardware; all it can see is the virtual machine of VMWare, and that has obviously been changed between VMWare Player and VMWare Server (although why this is the case, I couldn’t say).

There was to be no happy click-and-go Internet activation this time, however. According to Microsoft, I have reached my Activation Limit. This is the number of times I can successfully activate the software; after that, apparently, I’m screwed and have to buy another licence to be able to use a product that I already legitimately own and use.

I understand Microsoft’s purpose behind activation: After all, it’s their product, and they don’t want people using it without paying for it first. Fine.

Problem is, I did pay for it. I didn’t publish my serial number on the ‘net, I’m not handing out copies to all of my friends, or running every computer in the house off the same serial number. All I want to be able to do is to run a copy of Windows XP—that isn’t being used for anything else—in a virtual machine so that I can test web pages in MSIE 7.0.

When I called Microsoft’s activation hotline, I finally got put through to a human after 6 minutes of reading off numbers because my activation number was rejected for automatic approval (well duh, that’s why I was calling in the first place, nice of you to ask first before I went through the bother of entering all of the damn numbers there Microsoft). The person (Indian, natch) who fielded my call politely (if only barely intelligibly) informed me that their systems were “undergoing routine maintenance” and that I should call back later. So I don’t even know if they’re going to let me re-activate this copy of the software ever again or not.

Here’s the kicker: There’s a furor on the net right now because Vista will limit OS transfers—Apparently hardly anybody realises XP has already been doing the same thing for five years running, including myself—until today.

Conclusion

I still don’t know whether my copy of Windows XP will ever run again or whether it’s now garbage and I have to buy another CD key if I want to run it ever again (don’t worry Microsoft, I won’t). In all seriousness, screw Microsoft and the horse they rode in on.

It’s a good thing there are plenty of other alternative OSes out there, both free and otherwise. I for one won’t be buying nor installing Vista, and I strongly recommend you to consider doing the same; Microsoft is implementing even more restrictive and punitive measures into Vista because they got away with it in Windows XP; if you buy Vista, what will you be roped into agreeing to next, and when will you discover that you agreed to a licence that screwed you out of your money in the first place?

Update: I was lucky this time and got another registration code. Here’s hoping I don’t need to reinstall Windows XP ever again.