So, I don’t think I’ve complained too terribly much about Microsoft’s activation system… but now I will.

As I may have mentioned before, awhile back I switched to VMWare from Parallels. Well, it wants me to reactivate in VMWare, just like it did in Parallels. At the time I was too busy to mess with it, so I let the 30-day grace period expire. Fast-forward to today.

I’ve been continuing my learning process with C#/.NET as I progress along in StudioMan, just as something else to think about when I get overloaded with Cocoa. Up until now, I’ve just been booting over. I read that the new version of VMWare had some speed improvements, so I upgraded this morning and tried it out. Predictably, Vista went into lockdown mode and I had to call in for activation, since it’s already activated natively.

Here’s the fun part… I call in, go through the motions with the activation number… and then the guy on the other line tries to tell me that I don’t have the right to activate. When I ask him why, he says that Windows can only be activated on one computer at a time (note, this was immediately after I had told him that Windows was only installed on one computer). I re-explained the situation to him while digging up the Vista license file to double-check what I was pretty sure was true (which was). At this point, extraordinarily frustrated, I asked: “Do you have a copy of the license in front of you?”

“No.”

“Can you get one?”

“Hold on just a moment.”

At this point I’m put on hold for five minutes of nausea-inducing British/Indian pop music.

“OK, I have the license.”

“Can you tell me where in the license it says I can’t use it on a virtualized system?”

“Yes, section 2 outlines those rights.”

“OK. Read the first paragraph of section 2. You’ll notice that it says there that I must assign the license to one device. You’ll notice that it specifies a physical hardware system. I’ve told you multiple times that this copy of Windows is only installed on one computer.”

“I’m sorry sir, I cannot activate your installation.”

After face-palming, I finally asked to speak to his supervisor (which is probably what I should have done in the first place). After explaining the situation again and going through the motions with the installation ID numbers, I finally, 30 minutes later, had my copy of Vista activated to use in VMWare.

At which point, I was no longer interested in working on C#.