SemiConscious Dot Org

At long last, a full year after its release, there is finally some good news in the long, sad saga of Windows Turd Sandwich Vista. Responding to an unending torrent of complaints from enraged victims customers, the Redmond Borg Collective has finally relented and agreed to remove one of the most controversial features of the World’s Crappiest Operating System™.

In short, they’re killing the Kill Switch:

Microsoft is to withdraw an anti-piracy tool from Windows Vista, which disables the operating system when invoked, following customer complaints.

The so-called “kill switch” is designed to prevent users with illegal copies of Vista from using certain features.

But the tool has suffered from glitches since it was introduced with many Windows users claiming that legal copies of Vista had been disabled.

Well, that sure is nice of them, isn’t it? Microsoft will no longer remotely disable the operating system you paid hundreds of dollars for if its anti-piracy software erroneously decides your perfectly legit copy of Vista is pirated. (You’ll just be treated to annoying popups and warning messages, in perpetuity.) Isn’t that nice of them?

Of course, none of this really gets to the heart of the issue, which is that the hilariously misnamed “Windows Genuine Advantage” exists at all:

Microsoft VP Mike Sievert says that “It’s worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy has not changed. All copies of Windows Vista still require activation and the system will continue to validate from time to time to verify that systems are activated properly.”

Which is another way of saying that WGA will continue to be an affront to Microsoft customers. The initial activation process you go through with a new copy of Windows isn’t too onerous. But every time Microsoft makes customer re-validate their copies of the operating system, it’s inconveniencing them and effectively accusing them of possibly being thieves—and all because WGA doesn’t work well enough to determine once and for all whether a particular copy of Vista is legitimate or not.

Still, for those of you out there unlucky enough to have been stuck with Vista on a recently-purchased computer (or foolish enough to have paid good money to “upgrade” your XP machine) it will no doubt come as a relief to know that your expensive operating system won’t suddenly cease to function for no reason whatsoever. Yes, you should have many years of excruciatingly slow, memory-hogging operation ahead.

You could, of course, “downgrade” your computer back to XP. The process of doing so sounds like a royal pain in the ass to me, but you’ll be rewarded with a much faster and more stable operating system. You could also just grit your teeth and ride out the inevitable blizzard of service packs and hotfixes that might eventually fix Vista’s many flaws. After all, it only took Microsoft seven years to iron out all the bugs in XP!

Or… you could, once and for all, simply tell the Redmond Politburo to take a flying leap, and come over to the light. It’s nice over here, really it is.