A local lad from the village called me last week as he had been having trouble with activating a copy of XP Pro - attempts either on line or by phone were rejected by the validation process. He asked me to help and after some discussion he admitted he had bought the copy on ebay and had paid a buy-it-now price of less than £30 ($50). I looked at the holographic sticker and the booklet and at first glance it looked OK so I then had a shufti at the Microsoft website on How to Tell to see if there were any clues.
We found:
1) The finish for the install disk appeared to be a label ON the disk instead of part of the disk material itself.
2) The blue booklet looked fine until compared with a genuine one and only when they are side by side was it apparent that there were errors in the content, the layout and the quality.
3) The holographic sticker was a very good copy and some of the differences only visible using magnification.
We made a complaint to ebay who asked for a formal letter from an IT professional (they got me so it will have to do!) confirming it is a counterfeit copy.
I am not sure if he is going to get his money back - he did not in fact buy a proper copy from me and was strangely evasive when I asked him what he was going to do about the installation!
Moral - if it is dirt cheap there is probably something wrong with it or, as my old Mum used to say, "Buy cheap, buy twice"

Once again another true and revealing story.

I've learned my lesson with Ebay. I will no longer buy software, hardware or anything that could catch, start or aid a fire and especially not a replacement part for something...drastic consequences but i have a feeling your chap hasn't learned his lesson and I very much doubt he will be installing Linux instead of Windows

__________________

That is interesting!

Good catch, love a bit of detective work sometimes to add excitement to the day :P

I was cleaning the blue screen 'danger you are infected' malware yesterday on a customers machine, quite happily got it off but then when I went to update windows it came back that a VKL had been used to install windows and wasn't valid.

I let the guy know, and he didn't seem too fussed just said 'guess I won't be doing updates' I felt cheeky and told him that I would probably be seeing him soon then

You really do get what you pay for.

__________________
__________________
Check us out on Facebook!

Useful Guides: Networking 101 Security 101 Disable Real Time Monitoring Virus/Malware Preliminary Removal Instructions

I knew the term Keygen, but VKL was new to me...

Sounds like they did a heck of a lot better job Counterfitting the software
than did the outfit that counterfitted my Voyager DVD set.
External package was pretty good, but the contents were completely jumbled... even on the individual disks.
Those were not an Ebay purchase either.

A relative thought he was getting a good deal on adobe acrobat... turned out it was a keygen product.

Sometimes we just want to believe that we are getting a really good deal...
and reminds me of the country song about the guy who lost his mining wealth in a divorce...
"She got the gold, I got the ... (hole in the ground)."

VKL is just Volume Key License, generally business's get them but quite often people will use that key on their home PC's or what not.

I've had someone where the business actually canceled them all, and they got screwed because they had been using it on their wife's PC

I have seen the term VKL used along with "I have dozens of licenses to install when ever I want"! Meaning the friend down the street. How far does this 'volume' go and aren't there any conditions to be met?

Despite being 9 months late, this is interesting!