The Magic Pantry

My machine at work was nagging me to activate XP, and all the licenses had been maxed out, so we bought a single copy of XP Pro, and I entered the license key. Everything seemed to work, and I left on Friday a happy man. This morning, however, it was a different story. Upon logging in, I got the “you need to activate windows” prompt. So I clicked “OK”, thinking I might have to enter the key again. Unfortunately, the activation screen just displayed a simple “This copy of Windows is already activated.” message. Clicking the lone “OK” button logged me off, at which stage I proceeded to try every single combination of button clicking, windows closing, rebooting and so forth, to no avail. I was stuck in an infinite loop. Eventually, after much Googling and several dead-ends, we figured out that updating my existing XP installation to SP3 allowed us to activate against the new license, which was for a SP3 installation. I really, really hate it when doing things the right way is slower and less convenient than doing things illegally. It’s why DRM sucks, and it’s why my new games company won’t be going in for any of that bullshit – it just doesn’t respect the user.