emailing m$

[eidenk]

I think you are twisting the meaning of what you are quoting.

Nowhere in that is it said that there are two only alternatives which are, activation wil carry on beyond the end of XP lifecycle, or a patch will be provided, as you interpret it erroneously.

They only say activation will be supported until the end of the product lifecycle, and that after that a patch is likely to be provided to make activation unnecessary. That's all they are saying.

IMO it will require enormous pressure on Microsoft for them to release such a patch after they will have already "generously" extended the lifecycle of XP and the activation services two or three times at no extra cost.

[Tarun]

What geek has said is crystal clear in my opinion.

[CoffeeFiend]

What geek has said is crystal clear in my opinion.

Exactly.

Stating they will turn off activation like that (or are likely to do so) is truly deceitful. They'd be sued by countless millions of people in every country if they did so (doesn't that already make you think they wouldn't do it?), and providing activation servers costs ~nothing so no reason to turn them off in the first place. Once it becomes so old that no one uses it anymore, then they can release the patch.

[eidenk]

We'll see but today the potential exist for the situation I am joking about to happen. You just don't want to see it because you are MS fanboys IMO.

And listen to that.

Last month I bought a second hand boxed copy of Sonic Foundry Soundforge 5 on eBay. When I received it I discovered that two components of the software package were requiring online activation, the bundled Vegas Audio LE application and the pack of audio restoration plugins, so I went to the Sony website to activate them and entered the unique temporary serial numbers printed in the software documentation. Well I got the immediate answer that the party was over, the software has been activated too many times already, blah, blah, thank you.

[Offler]

well as said before i doubt that any representative of Ms will respond about unsupported software. Any response, technical tip, or additional software is indeed software support so they will not do it again.

Any kind of external activation for any kind of non-cloudcomputing software is not a good choice, worst choice for OS in my opinion.

at all the question is what can prevent situation when activation servers will not be available, and no patch which removes activation, or later no updates, no service packs. I just remember that no "closing" service pack was released to windows 9* in year 2006.

to close up all the updates it is just good to keep the last service pack available for everybody in archivation server. For example i really like the work that abandonware servers do, and work of people like here. without help here it could be impossible to use win9x without any update no matter if official or unofficial.