I <3 Microsoft! ^_^

I love Windows and Microsoft and all their awesome wonderful software beauty. This is what happens when I install Windws on one of the machines at work and try to activate it.

1. It activates “fine” but doesn’t allow me to login. Why? Well, I login, it says “you must activate Windows to continue” I click OK, and it says “Windows is already activated” and then logs me out. When I log in again, the same thing happens. Infinite loop. Sweet.
2. It doesn’t activate at all. When it goes through the steps, and attempts to generate an installation ID that I can pass onto Microsoft, the space where the installation ID is supposed to display is blank. Yes, blank.

These are both fucking catastrophic failures. Infinite loops and no user feedback? Hey, infinite loops and no user feedback during Windows installation causing installation to fail?! From the worlds largest software development company?! What the fuck is wrong at Microsoft?

So, I have been scouring the internet for a day and a half now trying to figure this out, and while there are reports of both problems occurring elsewhere before, none of the available solutions seem to work. I have formatted and re-formatted the machine probably eight or nine times now. Always the same problem. At the moment, I’ve got the blank installation ID issue. It’s been that problem for the last three or four formats.

Things I have tried:

• manually editing the registry to set the timer for activation to some far-distant future time
• copying the files used by the activation process (wpa.dbl and wpa.bak) from the installation CD into the %windir%\System32 directory manually after installation
• installing the drivers for all of the hardware in safe mode so the activation process can reliably generate an installation ID (it’s based on the product key and hashes of your hardware info) (did I mention this requires further registry hacks to enable software installation in Safe Mode?)
• tried various cracks and hacks from the ‘net to disable activation without any success
• been on the phone to Microsoft tech support for an hour without any success

Oh and I’ve done all this using three different Windows CDs, two with SP1 pre-packaged and one with SP2 pre-packaged.

HOW SWEET IS THAT?!?! LIKE SRSLY MCRSFT I <3 U SOOOOOOO MUCH RITE NOW!!!!!!!!!!!