Andrew's Profile

Member since February 27, 2004

  • Name

    Andrew Jones

  • Location:

    UK

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  1. Comment - Microsoft: SP2 Will Not Install on Pirated Copies of XP

    (May 13, 2004 - 8:00 PM)

    This is in fact true.

    Working in a small computer shop in County Durham, England we have had a fair few number of customers come up to us asking if we can activate their Windows XP Home because they either don't know how to do it, or are scared to do it.

    On every occasion we have had to *speak* to someone to get the code activated, something to do with the system not detecting responses properly or something like that we were told, but I would say it's something like 30-35 times we have activated someone's key for them and had to actually to speak to someone to get it done.

  2. Comment - Microsoft: SP2 Will Not Install on Pirated Copies of XP

    (May 11, 2004 - 8:11 PM)

    The way service pack two works is as follows, press the WIN KEY + Pause/break to bring up the system properties box.

    Look at the registered to section on the main tab, the big ID code on the bottom line here is the interesting part.

    The second set of digits will (hopefully) start with a "6"

    eg xxxxx-6.... Up to now Microsoft has allowed keygens to install with a PID of between 640 and 690 (i think it is - a bit of googling will pull up the right numbers) Service pack 2 will only accept a PID of xxxxx-640-.... They were going to implement the change in Service Pack 1 but it meant they would have to issue corp customers with new keys and the timescale wasn't possible - so they have delayed it for SP2

    however (and I don't condone piracy so this is purely for research) a search on Google for a keygen maker with the correct search terms will pull up a less than 100k keygen maker that doesn't just provide you with a hardcoded serial in a fancy interface - it actually generates a key the old fashioned way.

    Like I say for research purposes I ran it to see how long it took - and on my Amd950 Duron, Win Xp Pro SP2 v2096, 256mb DDR it created 10 valid serial numbers in just over 4 hours and 999 keys in total (if someone was to to run this on a dedicated computer for a few days - think of all the perfectly legal keys they could obtain, and more worryingly because they have a PID of xxxxx-640 they can't be classed as invalid keys in a future service pack release.

    Because I don't want to condone piracy I WILL NOT provide the search terms I used, but it's really only a matter of time before someone does.

    2p Worth