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Previous discussion of original tinyapps blog post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35993044

(238 points/7 days ago/151 comments)

I'll never get FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 out of my head.
Sup
I’m curious if the first five letters were meant to imply “F*** Genuine Windows” or if that’s just a coincidence.
I always thought the GW was short for George W. Bush. Not a popular figure when XP came out.
My headcanon is it was FuCK GateWay, as in the PC OEM the volume-license key was generated for
That famous Kylie Minogue song
Windows XP was my first time I actually felt like I had "hacked" something. My old lab had a machine that needed XP to run the software for the pipetting robot and the key was lost. A bit of googling and some rainbow tables tool later I was able to recover it. Still remember how surprised I was at how fast it was to crack whatever hash they were using.
Do you mean the key for XP? If so, you can recover it using a command or through the registry.

You can use rainbow tables to crack passwords for XP which was super quick though!

Ah it was the password for the admin account and not the key!
Afaik you could just set a new admin pw using a livecd and some tool.

I wonder if that’s still possible.

Can I just take a minute to reminisce on how it seems XP and 7 were the best MS OSes out there and everything before or since has been inferior to those few glorious years of XP and 7.

Sure it had issues but at least it wasn't an actively hostile bloated piece of adware it is now.

Each version of Windows has had its upsides and downsides.

My favorite in terms of looks and behavior is Windows 2000, and it's still in the top 5 when I think of desktop UIs that don't try to grab the user's attention. It was also much lighter on resources than XP, and didn't have poorly-animated dogs hiding behind the menus.

But oh man, let me tell you, the first time I experienced one of the newer versions restart its graphics driver without losing state was magical. I can't remember how many hours I lost to blue screens with a stack trace deep inside some ATI/nVidia dll, and to this day I can get a kernel panic in Linux if I tickle the GPU the right way, but modern Windows has proper GPU driver isolation and they did it without wrecking performance.

I wish it were somehow possible to run the pre-XP interface on the modern OS.

Im not a fan of the transition away from information density to giant touch buttons controlling interface design, BUT turning off transparency and animations is two clicks, and, although maybe my computer is powerful enough (despite not being technically compatible), Windows 11 is pretty snappy with effects turned off. And realistically, turning off most animations has been a recommendation for every version of Windows for decades.
I think people who say such things may just idolize the time ('the good old times')
Not me. I miss XP because of its stability and consistent UI. I miss 7 for similar reasons. Vista was a flop and I don't miss it even though "Vista times" were very nice for me. 10 and 11 have been unmitigated disasters.
The stability only came with Service packs though. Initial XP had terrible security. I remember installing an out of the box xp in early 2000 and without doing anything it was infected by malware within 15 minutes of being put online.
The stability of connecting a fresh XP install to internet and immediately getting exploited.
> I miss XP because of its stability

Ah yes, the grand stability of plugging in the wrong USB accessory into the wrong USB port and the computer crashing. Great times :)

What feature does windows 10 have that 7 didn't, that you find useful?

Personally the only thing I can think of is the slightly better calculator.

maybe, but they were also warmly received at the time they were released too.
You think XP was better than 2k? For me, nothing beats Windows 2000. I kept coming back to it even with SP3 and later.
Same for me, Windows 2000 had the stability of Windows NT4, but with added support for USB stuff.

Windows 2000 was the best version I ever used, though I admit I'd switched to Linux pretty soon after it was released.

Windows 2000 was such a good OS. Incredibly stable, reasonably performant, great aesthetics and a reasonably consistent interface throughout.
Every Windows release since the dawn of time have been hated up until the next release was made. Windows 7 was hated until Windows 8 was released, then suddenly Windows 7 was great. Except Vista maybe, which was hated no matter what.
That's not true. 95 and 98 were well received. ME was garbage. XP was liked, mainly because it wasn't ME and also the first consumer NT kernel. Vista was hated for many good reason. 7 was liked mostly because it wasn't Vista. 8 was despised because it had a lot of just bad UI choices. 10 was liked because it undid all of that.

So it kind of flip flops. Microsoft makes a bunch of changes that everyone hates. Then they roll back a lot of them in the next OS.

That being said, 11 is shaping up to be a debacle. But don't worry, 12 will drop all the things you hate about 11 but keep things they really wanted to include.

Great, now we only need activation codes for WinRar free trial :p
Coincidentally, RAR support will be included in Windows 11: https://www.engadget.com/windows-11-finally-gets-native-rar-...
The original source (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/05/23/bringi...) states:

> We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows.

It doesn't mention unarchiving/decompressing, maybe I'm being nitpicky, but at a glance, it seems to only be about compression? That'd be horrible though, but more horrible changes that that have gone through lately so I guess you never know...

That will probably turn out to have been a mistake. RAR should not be easy to use. TAR and CPIO would have been better formats to support out of the box.
There are other great alternatives for Winrar, like 7zip.
There are other great alternatives for Windows XP, too, but some people don't want or can't use alternatives.
LOL, just told somebody that this morning.
7-zip does recovery records now?
Using ollydbg to make a crack for WinRar so that the popup does not appear was my very first reverse engineering application.. Fun times.

Now the floodgates of the masses have opened to computing, and look at us

WinRar had an open backdoor for years wonder that's why it was free lmao
It had a bug caused by a third party ACE library that was closed as soon as it was discovered. The ACE library was 15 years old, not knowledge of the exploit. TBF after so many years of people taking the piss of the trial version, if they're still using it in 2023 without paying the one time $30 that's pretty much scumbag Steve and the reason it's free.
Winrar keygens have been around forever
The activation algorithm had been cracked in 2009, since then keygen binaries have been floating around. And it had been open sourced in 2019. The register seems again a bit late to the party
That's cool. Had they already patched long strings of single digits by then?
Can someone explain what have been cracked there ? I can't remember xp needing to be online activated back then, and for sure I didn't.
Windows XP does need activation involving Microsoft. Typically via online activation, but you could also activate it via phone, and possible some other communication methods.
Edit: I was confidently incorrect. It was some OEM/volume license versions that did not require activation.

Only XP Home required this.

XP Pro did not need online activation.

That's likely why some people are saying they never had to do it.

Im 100% sure I never activated XP, installed through the famous FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 quoted before.

And back in the days, as a teenager, I typed "format c:" every week-end ;)

Maybe it's the later builds that need activation ?

Seems like quite a lot of people are misremembering how Activation and similar technologies worked.

Retail versions of Windows XP required Activation by internet or phone.

Volume Licensing customers could bypass Activation with a Volume Licensing key - like the infamous key mentioned by others here that began "FCKGW-". This was a valid key prior to Service Pack 1 (SP1). SP1 blocked it and several other "widely known" keys.

Windows Vista and later made Activation mandatory for Volume Licences to stop this sort of key abuse.

Someone has mentioned Windows Updates imposing the Activation requirement - they are probably thinking of Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Genuine_Advantage.

WGA was a separate technology to Activation. It added further checks to detect various types of pirated copies.

One thing that's often overlooked about Activation is that it was only intended to deal with "casual piracy" - where people buy or obtain a genuine copy of Windows, but then try and use it on more PCs than the licence permits.

> Can someone explain what have been cracked there

Making keygen is the ultimate cracker's job, bruteforcing one key is significantly easier task.