The flaming pile of crap that is Windows Vista Activation

So because we can’t buy Windows XP anymore, I ended up getting “Vista Business Licenses” for the additional copies of XP that we needed in order to run XP under Parallels so that we can test our web applications with the other Microsoft flaming pile of crap that is Internet Explorer (version 6).

Well, of course I was going to take a look at the product, it’s what I do. As far as I can tell in the maybe 20 minutes total that I’ve had it running over the last month or two is that it’s a fine enough update. I mean, all operating systems stink, some more or less than others. And like OS X 10.4 is better than OS X 10.3 is better than 10.2, etc. Vista seems better than XP.

I was actually looking forward to using it more.

Well, until today, when it told me that my copy of Windows wasn’t legitimate. That is, the official Volume License media that I got from our Volume License vendor, and used the License Key that I officially received from Microsoft — when I called them and asked for a Windows Vista Business License Key.

We have some kind of Key managment service set up on campus, but I apparently can’t run the commands to set that because of whatever reason.

The key provided by Microsoft is “not genuine” anymore apparently.

And I get an error code when I try to activate.

I’m sure there’s a solution in all of this, it’s code, Microsoft has changed to a new asinine activation model, etc.

But life’s really too short for me to try to debug this stupidity. When the official media and official license keys don’t work. What else is supposed to?