XP and other software
 

I have heard that if you are running XP, it is able to detect and report to Microsoft if you are using any illegitamate software on your machine. Is anyone aware of anything like this or is this just an urban myth.

I have been running an illegal copy for the past 2 years, I havent found myself in prison yet.

What I meant was if you are running a legal copy of XP and everything else you use is illegal, will it report back to Microsoft. I also assume that pirated copies won't report back.

you can never be too paranoid when it comes to anything microsoft....

if this was really true I think there would have been a widely published workaround by now. This stems froma couple of services that call home I think, namely Windows Time, BITS, and Automatic Updates. Also uPNP was rumored to be a callhome prog/service. There was some controversy surrounding windows update but IIRC that was on win98.

That said, I doubt this is true. If it is, the only thing I think it would report is illegal MS products on a legal XP installation. While I doubt that's the case, might as well use it as a good opportunity to switch over to www.openoffice.org instead of pirating MS Office ;) Free, functional, and legal is always preferable to WAAAY too expensive and pirated. :)

I refuse to pay more then 50 bucks for any peice of software. So if its less then 50 I bought it, If its more then 50 its from mexico. Oh BTW, I was running XP 6 months before it was released. Now all my PCs have XP.

There is the Error Reporting File in XP that is suppose to report problems to MS in the background. There is suppose to be a way to turn it off, but i'm not aware how to do it. Don't know if it tells them what is on your computer, but it would report if they were causing errors??

Here are a couple programs for the parinoid.
Ive used xp-AntiSpy with no problems homepage not english but here is a link. http://www.webattack.com/get/xpantispy.html


Safe xp http://theorica.mirrorz.com/

you can get to this via right clicking on my computer...then going to advance...and then error reporting :)