vista madness
This just boggles the mind. Last Friday, I, sadly, installed Vista64 "Enterprise" on an HP workstation. Other than the usual Vista problems, it was a fairly unremarkable experience. Yesterday, for some random reason, I noticed that Vista was complaining that it hadn't been "activated" yet. So I clicked the "Activate Windows" button, and it churned for about 2 seconds, and then gave me this spectacular error:
Error Code: 0xC004F059
Description: The Software Licensing Service reported that a license int the computer BIOS is invalid
I'm thinking WTF? Since when does the BIOS have a license for Vista? Googling on this error turned up quite a few hits (which is disturbing in of itself). The official Microsoft solution was to update to the latest BIOS or manually enter a valid product key for Vista. I was already on the latest BIOS (released just a week ago, in fact), so off I went to the IT folks to ask them for a solution. After several hours of useless, time wasting suggestions, IT had no clue what to do. As far as they were concerned, this was a BIOS bug that HP had to resolve. But it just gets better. HP's stance was that they never qualified Vista 'Enterprise' for this model of workstation (xw8400), and only Vista 'Business' was qualified. So HP washed their hands of me too. But wait, there's more. IT's only remaining solution was for me to purchase a copy of Vista 'Business' and install it on the system. They said that there was a chance that I could do this nondestructively, but they weren't sure. That's right, I have to risk blowing away the entire setup of the system just to fix an erroneous windows licensing error!
I think the most pathetic part of this entire fiasco was that no one, other than me, thought to comment that something is very broken in Microsoft if they rely (and force upon) the contents of the BIOS to determine whether a system should run a particular version of their products.
So now I've got 27 more days left to activate Vista before the OS self-destructs.