"Bootleg" WinXP from Amazon???
I've just bought WinXP SP2 from Amazon, £90. OEM CD.
As usual with anything from Amazon except books, the sale is passed onto another company, Synergy-something. The CD has an impressive hologram etc all over it.
I installed it. Installed fine, key entered fine, downloaded all latest updates during installation, downloaded masses more updates afterwards, then asks to download the Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool, which then tells me I have been a victim of counterfeiting!!
The M$ website which you get taken to offers a free of charge validation package IF the counterfeit CD is of a high standard i.e. with a proper big hologram all over it. So I have sent it all off to them.....
Does this make sense?
Would Amazon sell bootleg XP?
Would it accept the serial#/key while online to M$ and not complain?
Would it download the updates during the installation?
Would it download loads of subsequent updates (about 150 of them)?
On a different tack, does this validation process check for other software on the PC and object to that, while pretending the windows O/S itself is bootleg? There is a load of other software on that PC, even though the partition that XP was being installed on had a trashed FAT and had to be recovered with a Truimage disk recovery tool. I don't use M$ software generally but there is an old copy of Office floating around on that PC.... there is also a legit MSFS (FSX) on there but its registry entries would have been trashed when the original XP was trashed.
The original XP, which got trashed, came out of an old MS developer pack... maybe that was a problem. But all that stuff got deleted after the accident.
Another thing is that I had installed that XP O/S twice, due to a misunderstanding, on the same drive. The first time it ended up on \temp\xp and only the second time it ended up in \windows where it should be. The first copy was deleted, and I don't think I ever got as far as downloading and running the Genuine Advantage tool.
This kind of crap is why I prefer to stick to win2000.... however in this case I had no option because Pinnacle video editor doesn't support HD cameras unless running under XP.