The worst part of Windows for me is *activation*.

Activation is the secret mojo in Windows which gets all pissy if you change hardware in your computer too often and makes you disgrace yourself by literally making a phone call to Microsoft headquarters and asking their permission to keep using it.

First, you have to read off a painfully long sequence of numbers and letters to an automated voice system. Sometimes the automated lady is OK with the numbers you read off, and sometimes she’s not. If she’s not, then your’e going to get transferred to an call center and read some more numbers ALL OVER AGAIN to a tech. Chances are you will have to do this multiple times as you will be stepping on his words because of the phone delay to India (he’s trained how to avoid this, you’re not).

The third level of hell comes if this guy doesn’t like your numbers. At this point, statistically speaking, you are probably running pirated software. But there are tons of people who aren’t. There just isn’t anyway to be sure.

In my experience, he’s going to ask some questions, but depending on the version of Windows license you have (OEM/Vendor/Retail), how dramatically your hardware changed (reflected in the number sequence), and how often activation has failed before on that product key, he’s going to go ahead and give you a pass.

Which requires – what else – that he gives you another really long sequence of numbers and letters to type into the machine to allow you to use the software you paid for, now that you’ve lost an entire morning in productivity at a cost higher than the price you originally paid for the software.

This week I was swapping some drives around and I got hit with the activation message again. Luckily the automated lady was OK with my numbers and gave me a pass this time. But the fact that I even have to do that for any software is just really infuriating.