Now Microsoft is pissing me off

[evil jose]

Took one of our clients to MS's website to download some files and it's wanting to authenticate his Windows and it asked for the Reg Key.

[Jester]

[QUOTE=evil jose]Took one of our clients to MS's website to download some files and it's wanting to authenticate his Windows and it asked for the Reg Key.[/QUOTE]
It's messican proof! :D

[evil jose]

[QUOTE=can'tdrive55]It's messican proof! :D[/QUOTE]

Just more work that's all :mad:

[dmh165638]

That really sucks in a large corporate environment. No telling where the software license's got stashed when the computer was installed.

[mikeb]

I'm starting to see that now also. I downloaded MS's anti spyware beta and the site "offered" to validate my version of windows. Even though mine SHOULD BE legit - my laptop came with W2K, and my other 2 computers are running Win98 and W2K both from the MS developer software subscription that I used to have and paid hundreds of dollars for - somehow I expect that i'll still be flagged as "invalid".

Big brother is watching.

[trey85stang]

no problems like that with linux... swaret --update --upgradeall it never asks to verify anything.

[DarkWolf]

[QUOTE=trey85stang]no problems like that with linux... swaret --update --upgradeall it never asks to verify anything.[/QUOTE]

Or with Gentoo: emerge --update world :D

[mikeb]

[QUOTE=trey85stang]no problems like that with linux... swaret --update --upgradeall it never asks to verify anything.[/QUOTE]

No doubt about that.

As a contractor though I find that my customers expect me to be "microsoftish" in their workplace in many ways. Since that's my bread and butter I have no choice but to be that way.

For example, I have VPN access right now to my customer's corporate network. I'm sure that there is a way to access the customer's VPN using linux, but my customer has distributed a windows cisco VPN client and they expect me to use it. Period.

I could of course try using something else but if ANY problem ever occurred that caused problems in my customer's network and they tracked the problem back to me - using a "non-standard" configuration - boom - i'm gone. As is my company, and the other people we have working there too. If a problem occurs using a "standard", "approved" configuration - then i'd be OK. For most large corporations that's going to be microsoft & windows and windows programs.

I've got two win2k boxes and a win98 box, and really i'm past time to upgrade all of them to XP to "stay current" with what corporations are installing.

Which OS is better is for me an irrelivant question; i'm going to use what my customers want me to use so that they'll continue to pay my bills :D Some day that might even be linux, you never know.