Update: Just to make sure everybody sees this - this issue has been solved, the info can be found in Robin’s comment below. Thanks, Robin! (Edit: These comments are lost due to changes of blog systems over the years.) I’m trying to go through this URL to activate the copy of Microsoft Reader installed on my laptop. I don’t see any problems until I get to the point where the activation process is actually running with the small progress bar… but every time I get this error message before the progress bar has filled up completely:
The Activation process has failed. There may be a problem connecting to the Microsoft Activation Server. Please try again later.
Originally I thought there could be a problem on Microsoft’s side of things, as I found a number of references on the web that talked about the problem going away after a while. But I’ve been trying this over the course of about a week now, and nothing has changed. Now, the activation FAQ has this entry:
Which operating systems work with activation?
Activation works with:
- Windows CE on Pocket PC 2002/2003 as well as many other Windows CE-based devices
- On computers: Microsoft® Windows® XP; Windows® Millennium Edition; Windows® 98; Windows® 2000; Windows NT® Server, Terminal Edition; Windows NT® Workstation License Pack; Windows NT® Workstation with Service Pack
This seems to make it pretty clear that Windows Vista is not among the supported operating systems. I read this early on, but I didn’t really pay that much attention because I couldn’t imagine that (a) this kind of software, which does obviously not depend on any OS specific features, would be written in such a way that it wouldn’t run on Vista and (b) if that would actually be the case, that Microsoft hadn’t provided for compatibility by this time. Can anybody shed any light on this? Is it actually possible that Microsoft Reader activation doesn’t work on Vista? I tried searching the net, but I found no information about this particular scenario.