lmao, harrison you naughty boy.

*Runs and hides behind his rock*
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I think having to activate stuff with MS is stupid. I still don't get the point (other than to reduce piracy, which I don't see it would do that well).
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The stupid thing about it all is that the pirate copies of course don't need registering making the tedious registration process something that only genuine customers have to put with. It was the same on the Amiga, buy a proper copy and you'd have to enter some code from the user manual or codewheel where as the person with the pirate copied skipped that stage. To an extent something similar happens with films. Buy a genuine DVD and you have to sit through a "Do not copy this DVD notice" where as a download will start straight at the film studios ident. And at the cinema you have to sit through a "There's nothing like seeing ##### at the cinema, but some people still watch illegal copies. This is bad because..." when you're the one that has chosen the cinema option. Or CD's with copy protection to stop people putting them on their MP3 players while the downloaded version is already in MP3 format. There are so many cases where the pirate product is more convenient than the genuine product because of the genuine products anti-piracy measures which are actually ineffective.
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So true. And this is why over the years, I've often purchased originals of games, but then cracked the copy. I therefore own the original, but don't need to enter copy protection details or registration codes.

This was bad on 16-bit systems with you needing to enter codes at the beginning of games, or suddenly getting a code request while playing the game. At least these days on the PC, you normally only need to enter the registration key once when you install the game and not every time you play it.
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I especially liked the 'dongle' anti-piracy solution that Ocean Software thought of including in a few of their games (Robocop 3, I think?). Brilliant stuff.

Didn't take long for it to be cracked though!
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Aye, took me ages to work out why i could get the original, i borrowed from my dads shop to work. After about 1 hours of trying, i went to put it back in the box and found the dongle, lol.

I normally do what harrison does. I buy my games, then install and crack, so the disc goes straight back in the box where it stays in mint condition, . I also normally gather them up and crack them, then burn them to a single DVD. Then my originals are preserved forever, .
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A lot of commercial software used to do that too which was always annoying.

After Effects 4 Professional and 3DSMax 2 were two I remember well as we had them both installed and running on the same IBM workstation at the time and the system would only ever detect one of the dongles plugged into the parallel port at any one time, even though they were meant to have a pass-through feature. This meant we had to keep going behind the desk to swap the dongles over!

I eventually "sorted" that problem by cracking both pieces of software! Not sure where the dongles went after that.
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I would still rather just enter a code from the manual, or from a box (like in Windows 98 etc), than have to actually contact MS. After all, the computer that I am setting up might not have an internet connection, and I certainly don't want to have to telephone them.
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It is a freephone number and an automated "enter the number followed by the hash" system IIRC. So you don't actually have to speak to a real person trying to suss out if you're genuine or not.
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It is still a hassle having to activate software over the internet, regardless of what the software is. But it is understandable, especially for smaller companies who cannot afford to lose too many sales through piracy.
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