I got my Vista Business serial no free through the MSDNAA scheme. I have been using the o/s for over a month now.

This morning, I restarted my pc, and at some point I noticed a small key on the taskbar. What? Activate windows? 3 days remaining?!?! After trying to reactivate online, I got the message that "the key is in use", and that I needed to purchase a new one.

To cut a long story short, I found another guy's post on microsoft community, stating that after installing the nforce4 SATA driver published yesterday in Windows update, he had the exact same problem, and had to reactivate through the phone.

That's what I did. And it worked. Now, I was told that this happened because a major hardware change occurred. No hardware changes were made to my pc. Absolutely none.

The only SOFTWARE change was made last night, when I downloaded the nforce4 SATA update through windows update (thats why I restarted the pc before getting the activation problem). Isn't that ironic?

Another legitimate user that wastes his time because of stupid protection systems.



Anyone with a similar experience?

Well sometimes a driver change will make the OS think it is a new piece of hardware rather then a simple update. Maybe the activation mechanism has been made a bit more sensitive on Vista (I'm still running Windows XP).

indeed that's the case. Microsoft has set a limit on how many pieces of hardware have to be changed before a reactivation will be asked (and many other mechanisms).

I understand why the driver update triggered the security systems, but this makes me wonder, if it happened after a month's use, how often will this occur in the future? I strongly disagree with protection schemes that waste legitimate user's time or even more (ie starforce's effect on cd/dvd drives). This type of problem (a driver making Vista think that there was a hardware change) doesn't seem that strange to me as a computer geek, therefore is one of the first things that Microsoft should consider when building this scheme. Especially when the drivers are distributed through windows update.

And another thing that really got to my nerves, is that the microsoft representative kept insisting that I made a hardware change, while I was trying to explain that it's probably the driver's fault.