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Users of pirated Windows Vista will soon discover that their warez installation being rendered useless via a “black screen of death”. Here’s the email obtained by:

“Good afternoon, as of this week, Microsoft has activated a function in Vista called ‘Reduced Functionality.’ This is a specific function in Vista that effectively disables nongenuine copies of Windows. Therefore anyone who has a pirated copy of Vista will experience:

A black screen after one hour of browsing
No start menu or task bar
No desktop

Please communicate this antipiracy initiative from Microsoft to your resellers — note this function has only just been activated in Vista worldwide and therefore any issues with nongenuine versions will start to arise from now onward.”

So, users of pirated Vista out there; it’s time to go legit. Alternatively, you could suck it in and get yourself acquainted with a better operating system

…and it’s not for monopolistic behaviour or anything very closely related to Microsoft; but for false advertising. Mind you, the advertisements are not for Windows Vista, but PCs which bear the “Windows Vista Capable” badge.

Quoting the scoop source by El-Reg:

The suit, Microsoft’s latest class action case but the first related to Windows Vista, comes amid claims that most business PCs also lack the hardware required to run most versions of Windows Vista.

Eighty per cent of PCs do not match Microsoft’s hardware requirements to upgrade, according to Everdream, a desktop management specialist. The biggest hurdle is lack of RAM: 70 per cent of machines lack the requisite 1GB, according to Everdream, which surveyed 140,000 desktop and laptop machines.

[...]

The suit claims many of the Windows Vista Capable machines are only capable of running Home Basic editions of Windows Vista and could not run the next edition, Home Premium, which featured most of the heavily advertised features.

That’s what you get by over-niching your products; something Microsoft seems to put way too much marketing effort on. Let’s see what we’ve gotten from the Redmond giant over the years:

• Windows 2000; Professional, Server, Advanced Server, Datacenter Server, Advanced Server Limited Edition and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server Limited Edition
• Windows XP; Home, Professional, Media Center Edition and Tablet PC Edition
• Windows Server 2003; Small Business Server, Web Edition, Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, Datacenter Edition, Compute Cluster Server, Storage Server and Home Server

For God’s sake, I hope that this lawsuit can put to death Microsoft’s trend to over-niche their OSs into stupid “editions”. I think their marketing team went overboard in identifying their market segments.