[pchelpers] Re: Microsof bug?

Hi Billy

> She's cured the problem, she restored to 2 days ago, and turned off auto 
> updates. She argues that if MS aren't giving her any more, then she may as 
> well not have the warning popping up either.

She cured the symptom, not the problem. Here are the real solutions that 
come to mind:

1) Demand a legal copy of XP from the person she bought the computer 
from (First make a backup copy on CD of all personal files! This applies 
to all subsequent solutions listed here too!)

2) If the vendor doesn't agree to providing a legal copy, contact the 
local chamber of commerce and/or better business bureau, or whatever 
it's called in her country, www.bbb.org. They can usually convince any 
businessman with half a brain that it makes more sense to stay legal if 
he (women are probably too intelligent to deal in illegal Windows 
versions) wants to really make money. They can also advise about step 
#3, especially if the vendor is a fly-by-night, in which case they may 
or should be interested in warning the community (in case they're stupid 
and say it doesn't concern them because it's not a registered business).

3) Contact Microsoft and the police.

4) Buy a legal copy of XP or use a friend's legal CD; i wouldn't 
consider it at all immoral to do the latter since she already paid for a 
computer and its operating system. If Microsoft were truly interested in 
protecting customers and not just its profits, it would have offered a 
floppy with a tool to check whether a Windows copy is legal many, many 
years ago. If many people had been running around with those in stores 
and when buying computers privately, illegal Windows copies would never 
have become so widespread. The truth is that MS was/is happy about the 
illegal copies because they helped establish Windows's and MS's monopoly 
position. MS realised that the pirated versions helped to strangle the 
competition from Linux and Apple.

5) Remove the illegal XP and install a legal version of Windows 98. It's 
easy to get a legal 98 CD free from a friend who doesn't even need it 
any more, so she can keep it. If she gets all existing security updates 
for Windows 98, it will be safer than XP even when MS stops providing 
security updates soon because no one is writing new malware for 98.

6) Remove the illegal XP and install Linux instead. She can get help 
from the local Linux users' group, and most stores now sell Linux 
versions that are easy to install and that are so much like Windows that 
some users don't even know they're not using Windows. She can easily 
find the local Linux users' group here:
http://www.linux.org/groups/index.html
http://lugww.counter.li.org/groups.cms


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