Windows Product Activation compromised

Basic Issues

The file wpa.dbl in the directory system32 contains information on the system at the time of the Activation. If more than three hardware components are changed, Windows XP will notice it and delete wpa.dbl. With that the user shall be forced to activate XP anew. You do not get another 30 days of time, though, to activate again (in RC1 it is a fortnight). Instead XP takes the date of the installation as a basis. That means you have to activate immediately to run XP again, if the installation took place 30 days ago.

For an overall view please find here again the list of the hardware components we call up:

  • Volume serial number of the system volumes (displayed with dir-command)

  • MAC address of the network card (displayed with netstat -r -n)

  • Identification string of the CD ROM drive

  • Identification string of the displays

  • CPU serial number

  • Identification string of the system's hard disk

  • Identification string of the SCSI host adapter

  • Identification string of the IDE controller

  • String of the processor model

  • RAM size

  • 1 = docking station, 0 = without docking station