Beta Drivers Deactivates Windows Vista License.

[onscreen 0]

I have recently installed Vista Ultimate 64-bit due to my career nature and some of my most used application works super well in Vista. Before i start, i insist those who wants to reply, do not make it into another XP vs Vista thread or throwing in advice to downgrade back to XP.

 

Here is my question, have anyone installed beta drivers, for any kind of hardware and after a reboot, your Vista license got deactivated and couldnt reactivate until you need to give a call to Microsoft for over-the-phone activation?

 

What i have experience is i installed a beta drivers from nVidia for my Quadro graphics card and after a reboot, Windows asked for reactivation of my Vista, a legit copy of Vista Ultimate. When i revert back to my previous drivers, the nagging for reactivation stops. It is kind of annoying as i have been in years, using beta softwares and drivers.

 

I am trying to collect as much information as possible as i have post this question in like 8 forums now and so far, 4 out of 58 replies have encountered this problem.

[Saint_Michael 3]

Well it seems to have been an on going problem since the beginning when Vista first came up and of course both sides (hardware Vendors & Microsoft) were quick to blame each other on it. However, a patch was made to fix this problem for both 32x and 64x systems, nonetheless, SP1 should have had this patch included when it came out but maybe in your case you never updated to SP1 I don't know. From the article though you might have done some significant changes to your system and when you installed those beta drivers they might have trigger this problem and so what I suggest is that you report this bug to the vender and so they can fix it and not trigger the reactivation again.

SOURCE

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

[onscreen 0]

Ah, good find there. I do stumble on the topic after 2 hours of my post of this thread. Anyway, i will look into this matter again once i am back to Vista. Thanks again SM for the link save me another trip of goggling in my fresh installed Win7.

[rayzoredge 2]

I have a guess... which isn't very helpful in actually fixing the problem (maybe), but it does explain why this happens.If Vista does the same thing XP does with OEM versions where you need to activate your copy using a hardware code, then that would be why your OS's license was deactivated, requiring activation again. My guess is that Vista sees a hardware change (even though it was a driver change) and thinks that you have a copy of Vista where it's not supposed to be (on the "original" PC with original components and configuration). This would be why it wants you to reactivate... and activation through the Internet would fail (I believe) because your machine will throw out a hardware code that is inconsistent with your copy of Vista. Calling them to reactivate would work if you can get the tech on the other end of the line convinced that you haven't installed an illegal copy of Vista onto another machine... and in this instance, when the tech gives you the recoded hash to activate your copy of Vista, I'd write down or save the code just in case this happens again.Does this explain it a bit? I'm going off of what I figure and not off of any official explanations as to how WGA works... but this does make sense to me.

[networker 0]

I hope I'm not a little off topic here butI had to call Microsoft on the phone, after I'd fully re-installed my xp operating system no more than about 12 times. Microsoft say that after 25, or is it 35? installs of xp,you can't activate it over the internet, but must phonethem instead. Quite a few times I loaded the xp disc just to re-install the basic drivers. It always fixed certain problems, but thesewere no way full installs.The install prompt never even came up. Could it be my problem with xp really began because I wasn't usingall generic xp drivers? Not with the number of installs?