PharaohsVizier

A long while back, Microsoft was selling Windows 7 upgrade packs to post-secondary students for a pretty reasonable price. While piracy was easy, I figured it'd be good to support this kind of behaviour and opted to purchase the key. I installed it over my Windows Vista and it worked fine for more than a year. Then today it just started saying that my copy was not genuine and started disabling my desktop background, flashing an annoying error from time to time and who knows what else was affected.

Certainly shocking to see this error pop up after using Windows 7 for a good year.

In any case, I thought it would be simple since the copy I had was ACTUALLY genuine. Went to the solve problem, and it told me to download this program to verify the key. It popped out the same sort of junk about how I have a counterfeit copy. It was so incredibly frustrating and the automatic help just keeps looping back to installing that software.

So I went to Microsoft's support. First thing I find is a number to call for Canadians. I'm not a fan of calling in, but I mean it could be alright, gave it a call and it said that the number was unavailable. Taking a look at the page (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/295539), it turns out the support was from 2008, maybe they got a new number.

I went again on Microsoft's site, and after going through Microsoft's support site, ticking off what problems I have, which product I am using and sifting through all the generic support solutions and finally reached some place where I can contact someone. I felt like a million bucks reaching the end there, and when I started off the support, it showed me a table of prices. They are charging for support?! That can't be right.

Those are pretty ridiculous prices, with a few troubleshoots, it could easily be a new key or two.

So once again I tried searching, I got to the page with the cost several times, and eventually navigated to a live chat that doesn't cost money (http://support.microsoft.com/contact...master?ws=oas#). The sad thing was that the way I navigated to this page was as a prospective buyer rather than someone who owned something. So once you've given them your money, Microsoft tries to cut you off. Well I finally had someone on the other side, and it didn't take too long to talk to someone, they tried to verify my key and they said it was counterfeit. I told them it had to be real since I bought it directly from them genuine, so after a while they somehow realized it was real. Wasting a good half hour of my time just on chat now, they said the way to solve my problem is just to reinstall Microsoft. When I told them that was the obvious solution and I needed a way to get it verified without reinstalling, he told me I should try the other support and directed me back to the page where I had to pay. I was just so frustrated at that point, I left the live chat and was just considering reinstalling Windows.

Reinstall, the go to response for pretty much any software support team.

I really didn't want to so I was thinking of ways out of it when I realized I could just use a crack to activate it. I spent 30 seconds on the web and got it cracked, problem solved. I've heard about this kind of thing before where paying customers bear the cost of DRM and anti-piracy, but you know this is the first time I've actually been seriously hindered by DRM and piracy offered a significantly better solution. It left me wondering why I paid for Windows 7 even if it was dirt cheap. It certainly wasn't for the support or ease of use. Microsoft will have to do a lot better to earn my money next time.

Obviously not my info, just stolen from online. Nevertheless, first time I used it, and it's surprisingly simple to use.