[geeks] Windows XP, and activation

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Sun, Nov 05, 2006 at 02:22:13AM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Today I tried to download DirectX 9.0c, and I was refused the download
> because I didn't have GA installed.

I would not install it that way. The regular way only works for a person
who ones one computer and loves to spend time watching a thermometer bar.

The download you get is a few hundred kilobytes. You run it and it ties
up your computer while it dowloads the entire product to a temporary
directory, installs it and deletes it. During that time, you should not
be running anything else.

The proper IMHO way to install Direct X, is to go to the Microsoft site and
download the "redistributable binary". There is no GA check and it downloads
a large single executable file. I usually capture the URL by right clicking
it, and download it with WGET on my file server.

Once it is downloaded, at your convience you can run the program which 
produces a lot of files in the directory of your choice. Runing the included
setup program from that directory will do a rapid install of what you need.

You can either delete the executable and the unpacked files if you no
longer need them, or copy them to another storage device and use them
on any number of computers (legally). The only illegal thing to do would
be to make CDs of them and sell it.

If you look around, almost every update provided for Windows is available
in downloadable form without the GA check. The GA check is the price
you pay for being spoon fed the updates. It's easy to understand why
it's done that way, someone adminstering multiple computers knows which
updates to install and which to not, does not want their Internet
bandwidth eaten up by hundreds of machines each downloading the same file,
and the GA check to them is just a big waste of time.

IMHO the GA check is really a marketing tool for legal copies of Windows
Vista, to "soften up the ground". Since just about every multiple instalation
is legal, it's just "preaching to the chior", and a waste of everyone's time.

Geoff.
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