Part 29: What's in it for me?

Now, whenever I start up my machine, I see this:

Oh, hooray. First of all, I've never heard of that, so I am not about to download it. (It seems legit but still this could always be a shell.) Second, why should I download it. Let's do a quick pros and cons analysis.

Pros for me: I get to know if my copy of Windows is valid. This is not really a pro. If I have a valid copy of Windows (here, I do. In other cases, [redacted]) I'm fine. It will tell me "congratulations, you have a non-pirated copy of this software" which is basically a waste of my time. I know that already.

Cons: If I have a valid copy, this is at best a waste of time. And if I don't have a valid copy, it (perhaps) is able to check that and I lose my OS (not a huge loss, believe me) and/or have to go out and buy a new one. But, there is at least the chance that I would be unable to use my computer.

So, in other words, if I run the program, the best thing that happens is nothing, and the worst that happens is my computer is thrown in to turmoil. Sounds like pretty much a lose-lose.

Some of the comments on a story about this "product" (if you can call it that) are pretty good (although generally poorly spelled with horrid grammar):

there's never really been any advantage of having a genuine copy (except for the feel good inside feeling some people get)

Actually I get that feeling downloading pirated Microsoft software.

The "genuine advantage" was double-plus good speak, perfected to an art during the Bush years. I, for one, would appreciate this change back to common sense English descriptions that actually mean what they say.

Now, just drop the telephone activation stuff and make it an online method already.

"But it already has internet activation, idiot!"

No. What I mean is when you've used up your Internet activations due to troubleshooting hardware problems, you'll need to use the phone to tell them your PID and answer questions to get a new serial number of some sort in return to activate. But why the phone? This is a disadvantage to the deaf population. We embrace the internet because it's deaf-friendly. Why on earth can't Microsoft use a webform or application that we can answer questions to and punch in our generated PID code in? Such fail.

Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.

Okay, fail.