"WGA" update for Windows Vista?

My girlfriend's Dell/Vista laptop is nagging her to install Windows Vista update KB940510. This is, apparently, something similar to the WGA update for Win XP. I'm guessing that while we can ignore installing it (though I can't see any way to remove it from the updates list yet), if we do that we probably won't be able to download and install anything other than "critical" updates.

Her copy of Vista was pre-installed by Dell and is legit, but I'm just wondering if there are reports of problems with this update (e.g. legit installations of Windows being shut down without warning). I suppose, MS being as it is, we're not going to really have much choice about installing it if we want to continue to have all updates available. We don't install all updates, but do like to see everything that's available. Typically we routinely install "critical" and "security" updates. Updates for MS Office/Word are also usually installed. Driver updates and updates for parts of the OS we don't need or use we try to avoid. This particular update is designated as "Important".

What's the word on this KB940510 update? Is it causing anyone any problems? Do we have any real choice if we want to have all future updates at least available to install?

I don't much see the point of this stuff. I don't endorse software piracy of MS products or any other company's stuff, but adding on additional layers of copy protection in this fashion just forces software hackers to be more devious and clever it seems to me. And the legit customers are the ones who wind up paying for it one way or another. It's just, in effect, some of the cost legit users have to pay because of software theft by others, I guess. But I don't like it.

I can already hear the posters busy little fingers typing "Get Linux" or "Get a Mac" or whatever. Maybe somewhere down the road that we'll make one of those choices. But for now, I'm sticking with XP on my home built machines until, at least, I see what the next "flavor" of Windows, after Vista, looks like. I may experiment with Linux from time to time, as I have a little bit already, but I use Win XP because I'm a computer gamer. I can forgo DX10 for quite awhile, I hope, as I don't think Vista is worth the additional money MS wants for it.

And my girlfriend has been using MS Word for many years as a professional published author and she doesn't want to spend time learning something different. I have and use Open Office, but I have a lot more experience installing, maintaining and using a wide variety of software than she does. She'd much rather stick with the tools she knows as any change in those is a serious distraction when she's working. I'm all for increased acceptance of Linux and the Mac and more hardware and software competition in general. But the fact is we have Vista on the Dell laptop and are likely going to have to live with it for some time yet.

Hmm, I guess it's not the best of all possible worlds! Write that one down! :cry

 

Well, just googling this KB, I see some people getting problems though I can't say how extensive it is. I always wait for a week or two before installing any Vista update just to see what fleshes out and I'll wait on this one.

 

I did a web search also augie, but thought I'd check here to see what suggestions I might get. Looks like, from the reading I did, this Vista update will be rolled into SP1 anyway. And, if I read correctly, unlike the XP WGA thing, this Vista update launches a nag screen if it thinks a user's version of Vista isn't legit, rather than pulling the plug on it outright.

Thanks for your response. Yes, we're going to wait awhile also and see how this appears to shake out once more people have some experience with it.

 

Our Vista on our Dell laptop, which is our only machine running Vista, is legal. But, apparently, some people who had legal copies of XP wound up on the wrong end of things with the WGA download. "Hoping MS has customer service ready to deal with this quickly" isn't something we really want to take a chance on if we don't have to given that my gf is working on a novel on that laptop. Yes, she has backups, but that's the machine she's used to working on and having to switch to something else would be an additional distraction that she doesn't need as she's having enough problems with the book itself.

Thanks for the info on your 3 Vista machines, Halo, but still I think we'll wait and see how this shakes out for at least a couple of weeks before we roll the dice ourselves.

 

Halo, I do appreciate the info, but as for "Whos to say that a seemingly harmless update to Windows Media Player will not cause the OS to crash, a hardware failure?" -- Well, I certainly wouldn't say that, but then I don't install any updates for an OS beyond stuff labeled as "Security" or "Critical" unless I feel a really compelling reason to.

That's one of my points. I'm not stealing from MS and I know that. I don't care to prove and prove again that I'm legal. I've activated all my copies of Windows. MS surely has a record of those activations. Now that's not good enough and if I now demonstrate I haven't used either of the exploits this latest update checks for, in 6 months MS will want me to prove yet again that I haven't used some additional exploits they've discovered...and etc etc. Meanwhile the hackers and warez people will keep on chipping away at MS and game companies' and application companies' software anyway.

As I wrote above, I guess it's just part of the price honest consumers pay for software piracy. But still, as far as possible, I prefer MS to "include me out" -- or I'll include myself out when I can. And that goes for other updates that I don't see any compelling reason to install either. Furthermore, and perhaps most important of all, when, as in the case of the confusing at best and misleading at worst, labeling of the "Windows Genuine Advantage" or the double talk description provided for this latest update exploit detection tool, MS isn't really very straightforward about what the update is for (unless you do a bit of poking around on the web) that doesn't inspire confidence either.

But hey, I'm just a lowly Microsoft customer since Win 95 days (and a local support person for a small organization back in the DOS days before I ever had my own computer with a MS OS) so I know how much my opinion counts in such matters.