M$ W7 reigionalization ???E

LoopyByteloose

Hello, I had a friend that is visiting the USA order me a copy of W7 64bit Professional OEM from NewEgg.

It arrived at his place in the US and it is marked for USA and Canada Only. I was planning to have him bring it back to Taiwan and use it to replace my Chinese Windows Vista with an English version.

But now, he fears that M$ won't register it from a Taiwan ISP. I don't need speculation about this. Quite simply has anyone tried to do a registration from abroad of such a copy?

The whole purpose was to save $$$. From NewEgg it was $139USD, in Taiwan it is only available directly from M$ in English for at least $250USD.

Martin_H

I don't know if Microsoft has regions for their OS licenses. But I do know why a New Egg costs half the cost of a retail license.

There are two kinds of Windows OS licenses, retail and OEM. A retail license comes with tech support from Microsoft's toll free number. An OEM license is bundled by a hardware re-seller and does not have Microsoft tech support. Instead the hardware re-seller (e.g. Dell) is supposed to provide tech support. Originally OEM licenses were hard to get via retail channels and Microsoft actively discouraged their use by end users. In the past few years OEM licenses have become fairly easy to get as Microsoft has allowed their sale unbundled with any hardware. But Microsoft has frankly sent mixed signals about their use by end users:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/is-it-ok-to-use-oem-windows-on-your-own-pc-dont-ask-microsoft/1561

BTW If you attend Microsoft sponsored training they'll often give you one day access to the employee store. Windows licenses are unbelievably cheap via that route.

tobdec

Loopy you should be fine doing this. My gf is from china and her parents came here and had a pretty nasty virus. After I backed it all up and reinstalled it I had to re-activate windows. The internet activation didn't work however the phone did. Granted this was for vista 32-bit but I think you should be fine.....if all else fails do the phone activation and call a friend in the countr4y the license is from and give them the numbers. They can then call m$ and do a phone activation and write down the activation code.

RDL2004

Microsoft does not treat re-activation the same as the initial activation. Initial activation of a regionally restricted version of Windows 7 will fail if done online outside the region where it was sold. You may be able to do it manually by calling by phone.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/howtotell/geoinfo.aspx

tobdec

I hate m$ products.....im a computer repairman and everyday I hate them just a little more. The tiny....(rules if you) will drive me insane somtimes.

LoopyByteloose

Thanks to all. I suspected it was going to take a phone call (and maybe some begging) if it was possible at all to register in Taiwan. Not only is W7 regionalized into six regions, it is now officially a group of OSes -- not one. Please note -- the W7 Business seems to be sold only to corporate clients while small businessmen will get W7 Professional.

The fact that it is now a group of OSes makes me more wary with where this is all going.

I took the gamble and will have to wait and see if it works. In order to get English W7 in Taiwan, I have to deal direct with M$. In the Taiwan OEM product, there doesn't seem to be any 64bit W7 Ultimate available and it is all Traditional Chinese.

I decided I will do a Triple Boot - the Chinese Vista 32bit, the existing Ubuntu Linux 32bit, and the English W7 Pro 64bit. After all, hard disk space is very cheap these days and I have a big roomy desktop tower.

Tor

Even if your ISP is in Taiwan it should be possible to go via a US proxy. Maybe via a friend located in the right place. If your router can't be set up to use a proxy for all its traffic it's also possible to use a Linux box in between - there are many possibilities. The whole point is simply to set it up so that the IP address seen by MS is from the region you want.

The whole looking-up-location-by-ID is driving me nuts sometimes. Google is getting close to useless. It all started with automatic redirection to google.no, google.de, google.fr and so on, which is insane these days - what with all the travelling people do in their job. Where I go almost everyone using computers are not from that country. Until you figure out how to trick google to point to google.com you may have to try to figure out the more advanced search terms in a language you don't know.
Now it's becoming much worse, because the search answers are 'regionalized', and much less useful than they used to be. Besides, google.no is broken half of the time - and the Chrome browser tries really hard to force the localized version of the search engine down your throat.

So I've been thinking that I'll need my own US-based proxy soon. Of course, US google is also getting more and more regionalized.. what we really need is for everyone to be included in a global mesh of proxies, so that the end-address IP is without value as far as location is concerned. Then all those schemes by google and MS will become meaningless and have to get dropped.

-Tor

kwinn

Tor wrote: »

Even if your ISP is in Taiwan it should be possible to go via a US proxy. Maybe via a friend located in the right place. If your router can't be set up to use a proxy for all its traffic it's also possible to use a Linux box in between - there are many possibilities. The whole point is simply to set it up so that the IP address seen by MS is from the region you want.

The whole looking-up-location-by-ID is driving me nuts sometimes. Google is getting close to useless. It all started with automatic redirection to google.no, google.de, google.fr and so on, which is insane these days - what with all the travelling people do in their job. Where I go almost everyone using computers are not from that country. Until you figure out how to trick google to point to google.com you may have to try to figure out the more advanced search terms in a language you don't know.
Now it's becoming much worse, because the search answers are 'regionalized', and much less useful than they used to be. Besides, google.no is broken half of the time - and the Chrome browser tries really hard to force the localized version of the search engine down your throat.

So I've been thinking that I'll need my own US-based proxy soon. Of course, US google is also getting more and more regionalized.. what we really need is for everyone to be included in a global mesh of proxies, so that the end-address IP is without value as far as location is concerned. Then all those schemes by google and MS will become meaningless and have to get dropped.

-Tor

What a good idea. I am so frustrated with typing in one address and being redirected to another. The original appeal of the internet was it's global reach and here they are working hard to "keep us in our place" for marketing reasons and maximizing profit margins.

LoopyByteloose

Hmmmm. I think I happen to have just the router - an Asus WL-500GP that has been refitted with Linux router software by "Oleg-the-Russian".

http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=Oleg%27s+router&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

It is very very flexible as far as configuration is concerned. Nonetheless, I suspect I am not going to try to set up a global proxy network to fool M$ (and the US government due to export restrictions).

Let's not help me into a Federal penitentiary or becoming an overseas fugitive (I do like to concept though).

RDL2004

You might try Googling something like: free proxy hide my ip

LoopyByteloose

It is interesting who and how web sites do look at your location. I get a 'find a friend' site with all sorts of beautiful women located near Kaohsiung and in Taiwan. The only thing is all the photos are obviously not Asian. Whoops... This is an obvious scam dating service trying to pretend to be local.

On a more practical front, I get a lot of Chinese language sites when I am looking for the English language site. Fortunately these days, Google Translator is handling quite a bit of the conversion load, though it needs character based input and some sites are mostly graphic images of text (due to Chinese character content displaying better).

Anyway, I will do the reading on proxy routers. It is an interesting topic.