Three Bears IT Consultancy

Archive for September, 2009

Microsoft have released plans to make upgrades to Windows 7 available for UK students from September 30th for either Windows 7 Home Premium or Windows 7 Professional.  The offer is time limited (though no timescales were visible on the launch site – http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windows/studentoffer/default.aspx).

To qualify, users need to have an academic email address ending in .ac.uk or .edu for the United States and to possess a PC capable of running Windows 7, but which already runs a genuine copy of Windows Vista or Windows XP.

We’ll pass on any more information as it becomes available…

System Administrators across the UK were caught out with a new update being pushed across their systems via Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) – the Microsoft server application that centrally manages updates across an enterprise/business.

The update is designed to catch out those companies who, having entered a licence agreement with Microsoft and upon receiving a Volume Licence Key (VLM) decide to then allow pirate copies of their licence key to circulate, either across the workforce or out onto the Internet.

Microsoft Office installations licenced under a VLK do not require online activation and so this problem has placed a rather large dent into Microsoft’s profits.  Hence the move late last month with KB949810 being downloaded onto machines in the UK around August 26th.

It would appear that the update has previously been published to a handful of countries with a low user population, later being accidentally further rolled out to higher volume countries.

Many genuine users are now reporting issues with Office Enterprise 2007 and previous version now require online activation and users being left in the lurch, unable to work.

Three Bears IT have experience in establishing and administering WSUS systems and can offer help and support in this area for competitive rates.

If you are receiving a message telling you that your copy of Office is not genuine and/or your system is displaying a message telling you that you only have 15 (or so) days until your Office installation is deactivated, then download the OGA toolkit.

Running this on your machine with validate both Windows and Office and will give you an error message which will say why your copy of Windows or Office is no longer valid.  It could be that your company’s VLK was leaked onto the Internet and was invalidated or it could be that your mate who got a copy of the software at a car boot sale has been conned.

Always buy your software from a reputable supplier!!!  And although the update will not appear in your Add/Remove Programs list, there are ways in which is can be uninstalled for those system administrators who have genuine copies and VLKs.

Download OGANotifier.msi from this location:
http://www.box.net/shared/t4aq9va0qa

If your system won’t allow you to download executable files, then you can access the compressed CAB file here which you can extract file from using WinRAR:
http://www.box.net/shared/i2sok35e2t

Once downloaded and uncompressed, right click the file and choose Uninstall.  That should then remove the problem.

Contact us for more details at computers@threebears.biz