FyreSpiryt said: "There are lots of ways for CL to protect what they made. I would like to know why they chose the one that they knew makes people mad over all of the rest." If you think that would make folks mad, perhaps you should see what happens when folks realize they have to keep track of a hardware dongle (Ford Motor company was notorious for that on their dealership network PC's), or realize that the 'copy-protected' CD won't work in their off-generic brand of CD-ROM (which is a useless scheme anyhow). If there's a method they could've used that was at least as effective, without pissing as many people off, I'd like to know what it is. As it is, I doubt that no more than a handful of folks, most of whom have already posted, will even care about 'activation'... after all, Windows XP sales haven't slowed down by much. Praxis 22 said: "My desktop is running a "select" install from work, comes pre-registered, because companies rolling out 200-2000 seats aren't going to get on the phone for each one. My laptop is runing a hack, it permanantly thinks it's day one of my 30 day "trial" period." You realize you've violated the Microsoft Windows XP EULA in the latter instance, yes? Reverse engineering and hacks to the protection scheme are no different from 'cracks' that disable CD Keys, whether you own a legit copy or not. Also, I am aware of the Select versions, but I am also aware that unless you have signed permission from your employer to take a copy home and install it, you're technically pirating that home (not the laptop) copy of XP. But if that machine is at work and is part of your job, then I misunderstood, and I apologize for that misunderstanding. "Nah, unless it looks like Redmond, feels like Redmond, and (most crucially) offers simple data interoperablity, (ever tried to edit a recent Word doc? Access database? Excell spreadsheet?)" Actually, yes - I do so every workday, and in my Linux partition. I use Open Office mostly, but Star Office does the job too. OO is free for the download: http://www.openoffice.org For those who still want to use MS Office, you can pop in Codeweavers' WINE plugin and use the original MS Office prducts in Linux, including MS Viru^H^H^H^HOutlook. ;) It'll fall within Joe Sixpack's reach soon enough, I can promise you that. "I find it hard to believe that if Adobe added a dongle to Photoshop tomorrow, that anything would change. " I agree perfectly - after all, 3DS Max has a warez version. OTOH, I've recently had to fix a computer that had that warezed version on it - the problem was that his 2.2 GHz / 1GB RAM machine was running slower than a 486 even after he shut 3DS Max off... turns out that the print spool in Windows sucked down nearly all his CPU power in fooling the hardware protection scheme in 3DS, and continued to run as a seperate proggie after 3DS was shut off (3DS Max' dongle plugs into the parport.) So yeah, the dongle can be foiled, but look at what you have to give up to run a dongle-cracked copy. Nothing's perfect, but then again, using cracks to get around stuff is not much better than just going to Morpheus and downloading the thing IMHO. It does you nor the company any good.