[asveikau]

I remember hitting that on Vista when I swapped out a motherboard that died, circa 2007. It asked me to call a phone number. So I did. I explained to the phone rep what I did to cause the error. They asked me where I got my copy of Windows. I told them. They unblocked me.

[encom]

How nice of them to grant you permission to run their software on your machine!

[dddw]

... that you already paid for

[asveikau]

To me it was amusing that they put up this barrier, but hired a staff of humans to make sure you could bypass it.

I suppose that could be a gate to prevent people from installing on more machines than the license allows if done at scale. But doesn't lock out legit reinstalls from paying customers. For a cost to MS, to employ that staff.

[ziml77]

I believe the scale part is correct. They don't want anyone sharing the software, but they especially want to stop people from selling illegal copies and to stop businesses from using a single license across a hundred machines

[pjmlp]

It also helps sorting out issues where everything fails.

This is what makes a big difference with doing business with Google and having to deal with bots instead.