Windows Vista crack
“I’VE installed Windows Vista on my PC.”
I wasn’t surprised to read the text message on my phone. It came from a long-time PC user who, for reasons that will soon become clear, will remain hidden behind the pseudonym “Roger.”
“I used the Paradox crack, which tricks Windows Vista into thinking that you’re running it from an OEM [original equipment manufacturer] computer, so you don’t need to activate it anymore,” Roger told me when we met over the weekend, as jolly as ever.
He was referring to product activation, a measure that Microsoft introduced with retail versions of Windows XP. The anti-piracy scheme required users to “activate” their software by sending a product key over the Internet to prove they were running a legitimate copy of Windows. Failure to do do so after a certain time rendered the software useless.
In recent years, Microsoft added an extra layer of protection that barred updates over the Internet to unlicensed Windows installations. These anti-piracy measures came together in Windows Vista, the new operating system that Microsoft launched in January.
By early March, however, a group of hackers released the Paradox crack that takes advantage of how Windows operating systems bundled with branded computers from big companies such as HP and Dell no longer need to be activated.
“Microsoft allows large hardware manufacturers… to ship their products containing a Windows Vista installation that does not require any kind of product activation...,” says the README file that comes with the Paradox crack. “Instead these so-called ‘Royalty OEMs’ are granted the right to embed certain license information into their hardware products, which can be validated by Windows Vista to make obtaining further activation information (online or by phone) obsolete.”
The crack is circulating on the Internet as a compressed (RAR) file.
The steps described in the README file are fairly simple:
1.) Install Windows Vista from any install CD without entering any product key during the setup.
2.) Run the emulation program to fool Vista into thinking that it is running on an OEM computer with a royalty license. Choosing “Asus” at this stage will yield a choice of installing Windows Vista Ultimate, Business, Home Premium, or Home Basic.
3.) Reboot the PC.
4.) Run a program to install the OEM certificate that matches the choice in No. 2.
5.) Run a program to install the matching product key. A file that comes with the crack shows product keys for Asus computers (6), Acer (1), HP (3), and Lenovo (1).
“The whole process—excluding the Vista installation--took me about 20 minutes because of the reboot and because I was very careful to follow the instructions to the letter,” Roger said.
“When it was over, Vista reported that I was running an activated product and I’ve been able to download 50 megabytes of updates from Microsoft’s Web site without a problem.”
For research purposes, I downloaded the Paradox crack (just 428 kilobytes) and examined the files. I can’t vouch that it works because I didn’t have a Vista PC to try it on. Besides, piracy is illegal. Anyone who wants to use Windows Vista ought to pay full price for it—and these days, that’s about P26,000 for the Ultimate edition. I prefer to use a free operating system and software that I can download and use without breaking the bank or any laws—but I digress.
What will happen to Windows Vista, now that it’s been cracked?
It’s difficult to imagine that a company as pugnacious and as litigious as Microsoft will take this sitting down. Perhaps by the time you read this, it will have already moved against Web sites that carry the crack. It might even move to shut off computers that use the OEM product keys—but I’m not sure how they would do this without hurting legitimate buyers of branded computers. In the long run, it might even lead Microsoft to impose product activation on its OEM customers as well. If it does so, it would only reinforce the notion that Microsoft’s legitimate customers bear the real cost for its anti-piracy campaigns through recurring—and ultimately pointless--authentication procedures and higher software prices. After all, somebody’s got to pay for all those lawyers’ fees and programming man-hours spent cooking up new protection schemes that will be cracked a month or two later. And you can bet it won’t be Roger.
