I decided today to upgrade my desktop's BIOS. Of course, Windows decided that this was a big enough change that I needed to reactivate. Not suprising, but what was suprising was the trouble I had to get to in order to reactivate. Apparently, Microsoft changed the activation policy a while back so that you can't reactivate a copy of Windows over the net. Unfortunately, at least in my case, it didn't say this when I tried to activate, it simply hung forever on the "Detecting Connection..." screen. So, after about 20 minutes of waiting and retrying, I decided to try phone activation. That ended with the same result 3 times in a row. The automated attendant said, "Sorry, I couldn't activate your copy of windows" and hung up on me. So I do some searching online and no one seems to have any information on the problem except that you need to speak to a customer representative... unfortunately, none of the options given on the phone let you speak to any live customer representative. Not wanting to settle for a broken desktop, I tried calling again and mashing the 0 button. I had to wait about 30 seconds for all the messages to finish before it worked and I was informed that I was being transfered to a live representative. Finally, after entering a new product key and clicking a few buttons, they were able to provide me with a working code. Now, why in the hell was this so hard to get working? At the very least, Microsoft could add a little message after the failed activation that says, "If you are sure your installation ID is correct, please press 0 to speak to a customer service representative." Apparently, the rep I talked with knew I needed to enter a different product key simply by looking at the first couple numbers of the installation ID, so why can't the automated service make the same judgement and transfer me straight to a rep after this first 6 digits instead of making me say the whole thing and then hanging up on me?