Vista phones home to check for piracy
When Windows XP first came out, it only checked online once after you installed it to check the key for piracy reasons, if the key wasn’t valid, you were asked to purchase a legal one and the copy of XP was deactivated. Things are different now, even for XP users. Usually when Windows updates are rolled out for XP, there is a WGA update utility in there, WGA checks your windows XP key when it installs and every so often thereafter. This is nothing new but Vista takes it to an entirely new level.
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