Forget about the WGA! 20+ Windows Vista Features and Services Harvest User Data for Microsoft - From your machine!

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

Vista's EULA Product Activation Worries “ Does the Microsoft EULA adequately tell you what will happen if you don’t activate the product or if you can’t establish that it is genuine? Well, not exactly. It does tell you that some parts of the product won’t work - but it also ambiguously says that the product itself won’t work. Moreover, it allows Microsoft, through fine print in a generally unread and non negotiable agreement, to create an opportunity for economic extortion. ”

Microsoft seals its Windows and opens the door to Linux "You buy a copy of Vista and install it on your laptop, which you mainly use for word processing and budgets because you use the office machine for email. For a short period, everything is fine. Then, one day, your laptop stops working. The only thing that it will allow you to do is to run a web browser - so that you can connect to Microsoft to 'activate' the software that you have purchased. Or, to put it another way, Microsoft has taken control of your computer and decided what you may and may not do with it - even though you have bought a licensed copy of Vista from a reputable dealer." 

Forbidding Vistas: Windows licensing disserves the user "Reading the Windows Vista license(pdf) is a bit like preparing for breakfast with Lewis Carroll's Red Queen: You should be ready to believe at least six impossible things about what users want from software."

"What the contract states is that unless you can activate the product (irrespective of whose fault it is that you cannot activate it), you forfeit your right to use the product, and therefore access to any of the information on any computers using the product."