Win xp wga patch

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack. K-Lite Codec Pack Update. Mozilla Firefox. Driver Booster. Windows Cannot Find Gpedit. WGA Remover 1. Booo 2. Not Geeky 3. Average 4. Good 5. Major Geeks Special Offer:. A lawsuit that accused Microsoft of misleading consumers to download and install an update for Windows Genuine Advantage WGA under the guise that it was critical security update has been tossed out.

Last month , a federal judge refused to certify the lawsuit as a class action, which would have meant anyone who owned a Windows XP PC in mid could join the case without having to hire an attorney, and on Friday the same judge dismissed the case completely.

This was a day after the plaintiffs and Microsoft agreed to drop the lawsuit. Microsoft has said it won't "turn off" illegitimate copies of Windows. But could the software giant be interpreting that literally?

The more likely preventive measure probably isn't turning off the computer. It's not hard to imagine that WGA might direct its predecessor, Windows Product Activation WPA , to lock you out of your computer until such time that you can present a valid product key.

When WPA kicks in, the computer boots to a login screen that doesn't let you use the computer until a valid activation code is entered.

In Vista, this WPA screen links to an option that lets you buy a new copy of Windows, even extending use of Internet Explorer for that purpose, though you can't actually login to Windows prior to successful activation.

Microsoft has more than once alluded to the fact that it's reserving the right to require the installation of WGA Notifications on all computers, possibly sometime early this fall.

It's simply not known yet how Vista's version of WGA will behave. At this writing, it is possible to both remove WGA Notifications and also to prevent it from attempting to reinstall after you have removed it. There are many sites on the Internet that purport to help you remove WGA Notifications from your system. Microsoft has recently changed some things about this software, and many of those instructions could be out of date. I have yet to see a definitive work on this subject, and I don't consider this one to be either.

Since WGA is still in beta, and Microsoft is still developing it, I suspect that the best set of instructions is yet to come. A large portion of my instructions are based on Microsoft's How to disable or uninstall the pilot version of Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications KnowledgeBase article, which showed a July 12, , revision date at the time that I prepared this article.

It should be noted that many of the simplistic methods of halting WGA Notifications, such as blocking it with your firewall or renaming the WgaLogon. They are effective right now. If Microsoft renames its files, those protections would break. It's the part that "phones home. The part of WGA that concerns me most is the virtual certainty that WGA Validation will falsely identify even a small percentage of Windows installations as being "counterfeit" when in fact they are not.

Important: These instructions require editing the registry. You may want to start by taking a System Restore point so that you could revert to it in the event that something goes wrong. Some of the steps have changed or evolved. There's no guarantee the directions will work perfectly for you, but lots of smart, positive reader feedback has already improved them immensely, and they should work for you. Update: These instructions were revised on August 6 to work around any possible removal of WGA Validation, which is needed to download optional programs and non-security updates from Windows Update or Microsoft Update.

To make a System Restore point, open the Start menu, choose Run, copy and paste this line into the Run field, and press Enter:. I've tested RemoveWGA 1. Open the Folder Options Control Panel. Click the View tab. Remove the check, if any, beside "Hide extensions for known file types.