WAT's happening to Windows 7

Tony Austin
Monday, 11 May 2009 08:36

Opinion and Analysis

But it's not all about consumer users of Windows. "We also heard from enterprise customers that there were some scenarios where our activation tools could be improved, to help ease the burden on IT departments" said Microsoft's Joe Williams.

"So we've added to some of the existing tools for IT professionals and made them easier to access to better support those who need to manage Windows activations at an organizational level."

"One example is the new support for activation in virtualization scenarios where KMS now counts virtual clients. [KMS stands for the Key Management Services tool for volume licensing and product activation.] This is important for customers who have fully virtualized environments or customers who have dev/test environments where virtual clients are used heavily."

"Microsoft has focused its anti-piracy efforts on protecting customers and partners from the evolving risks of counterfeit software and increasingly sophisticated piracy scams," he went on.

"Every day, more than one million users activate and validate their PCs to make sure they’re running genuine Windows software, and Microsoft has made significant investments in customer education and engineering efforts to make this process simple, easy and reliable. For customers who do discover they are piracy victims, Microsoft has made a range of options available to them, including buying online or through retail, often at special pricing or even at no cost."

Microsoft thought that they could improve upon the WGA mechanism in Windows 7.

"For example, with Windows Vista Service Pack 1, if a PC was not activated during the login process, customers would periodically see a dialog box as a visual reminder they still needed to activate their copy of Windows. Within this prompt, they could choose to activate immediately or later. "

"But the option to push the 'Activate Later' button was greyed out for 15 seconds. Customers told us that while the prompt grabbed their attention, they didn’t understand why they needed to activate immediately and that the delay was annoying."

So, he continued, "In Windows 7 we modified this process: When customers choose to activate later they will see a dialog box highlighting how activation helps them identify if their copy of Windows is genuine and be allowed to proceed immediately without a 15-second delay. In Windows 7 we’ve made changes so that users will see more informative notifications messages and be able to more easily complete the tasks they need to."