Windows Vista: 6 hours on hold to activate

Waiting on Hold for Microsoft Vista Activation, originally uploaded by jetteroheller.

I thought I was frightened enough when reading the EULA for Windows Vista, in that it basically says your whole computer can be searched for data by Microsoft, and Microsoft promises it won’t use the data gathered for commercial benefit. It explicitly doesn’t say nobody else can, though.

Anyway, if you read my last two posts on Windows Live Writer and Windows Experience benchmarking, I was actually starting to like Vista. There’s no SSH client in the world as good as Konsole on KDE, but fine.

Yesterday, however, things all went to heck. I’m 5 days into my Vista install, and it all of the sudden randomly decided I needed to ‘activate’ my install. I’m not doing anything fishy, and have an OEM license for Vista, so figured this shouldn’t be a problem.

However, things didn’t go well. As soon as Vista told me to activate, it whacked out my screen settings so that I couldn’t really even see what I was doing. So, I rebooted. This then put me in no-access-activate-right-now-you-dirty-old-man mode, where you can either activate on-line or over the phone only, and nothing else. So, I attempted to activate on-line. It accepted my code, but then said there was a problem using it, and I couldn’t be activated.

So, I then tried option 2, which was to call up Microsoft and activate using their super-nifty automated activation service. I tried this, called them up, punched in my codes, and they said I punched in the right code, but my activation wouldn’t work.

So, I then tried option 3, which was to call up Microsoft and talk to someone on the phone.

I then proceeded to wait on-hold for 6.5 hours on a Thursday, trying to have an Activation Expert Debugger or whatever try to help me.

They had 1 song on their hold music, an early ’90s ballad that sounded like a bad rendition of a bad ’70’s ballad, interspersed with “we have an unusually high call volume” messages.

Eventually, my call was ended by an unfortunate person who came in to my office to use my phone, didn’t look before he pressed the button, and hung up on Microsoft.

Oh, well, it’s for the better. I’m going back to Linux. Fedora Core 6 has no such worries. It has perfect hardware driver support too, so all I do is put the DVD in and it works.

I know there’s no Dreamweaver for Linux, which is my main other grudge in life, but as L. Ron Hubbard said in his organizational policy entitled, SERVICE,

“Service is the watchword. Orderly service is preferable to disorderly service, but any service is better than no service.” –LRH.