"Judah" wrote in message
. ..
Do you think Microsoft will prohibit Windows XP users from operating once
they deprecate that operating system? Presumably it's a ways away, but I
believe Windows XP SP 1 was officially deprecated in October '06...

I don't know. What I do know is that there's no reason to believe that once
Windows XP passes the same "no longer supported" mark that the earlier
operating systems have (in part) already passed, Microsoft will continue to
provide activation codes for those products. IMHO, besides the support
costs (especially in today's "security update once a month" environment),
Microsoft also has a lot to gain simply in new sales if they can truly
obsolete your old operating system. I personally am not convinced they
would do this, but there are a lot of people out there who are.

Also, keep in mind that Vista will not only have Microsoft's product
activation, they will actually have code within the operating system that
can *disable* the operating system. Even if you get the operating system
installed and activated, something could happen later down the line that
would cause that code to be activated, and for your operating system to
simply stop working. While I doubt that Microsoft would use this to
actively turn off all operating systems out of their "supported" lifetime
(even as I can't rule that out), there's no reason to believe that the code
will work correctly 100% of the time. It could easily have a bug that
causes the operating system to become disabled unintentially.

And if the operating system is no longer being supported, do you suppose
Microsoft will actually help a customer who calls to ask and try to deal
with such a problem? I suspect they won't. I'd guess that Microsoft
product support will simply tell that user "sorry, we no longer support that
version of Windows".

At least with XP, once you get the OS activated, as long as you never have
to reinstall it and as long as you never install some Microsoft update that
can disable it the way that Vista can be disabled, you are assured that the
operating system will continue to work indefinitely. With Vista, there is
no such guarantee.

There are many reasons I hate copy protection, and product activation in
particular, and this is one of them.

Pete