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Replying To:
Virtual hardware is standardized...[ Parent ] (none / 0) (#40)
by Anonymous User on Thu Oct 26, 2006 at 03:13:37 PM PDT

Regardless, how will they find out and prove you ran Vista on a virtual PC?

Simple... Virtual hardware intentionally emulates outdated video, networking, mice, etc. in order to support the most operating systems "out of the box". VMWare emulates a 1995(?)-era "AMD PCnet-PCI II" Ethernet card and a 1997-era "Sound Blaster AudioPCI" card, hardware that's so outdated it's not in many physical machines anymore. To add, IIRC, all VMWare virtual hard drives have a manufacturer name of "VMWare" in it. The hardware info gets transmitted back to M$ under the guise of WGA, so Microsoft knows which installations are virtual and which are "real".

The problem, for Microsoft, is that once someone virtualizes a registration number, that hardware will not change (excluding the CPU) not matter how often they move the image to a new machine...

[ Parent ]



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