Namoh, given the length of time that you've been a member of this forum (and, indeed from the number of posts you've made about alcohol in the past), if you hadn't already bought it you were a lost cause anyway.

@ All

Whilst I'm no fan at all of on-line activation (whether that be for XP, alcohol or whatever), it really is a matter for the alcohol team to determine what is in their best commercial interests.

None of you know and I don't know whether alcohol's registrations have increased or decreased as a result of the introduction of activation. However, Phoenix does and he has made it pretty clear that on-line activation is here to stay. You can draw your own conclusions from that.

Insofar as the suggestions have been made that activation is useless because cracked copies appear on the warez scene almost as soon as any new version is released, again this is a matter for alcohol to determine its own commercial marketing model.

However, it ought to be fairly obvious that activation is not, and never has been, designed to deal with the problem of cracked software. People who are prepared to use a cracked version are unlikely to ever register anyway.

What activation is designed to do is to "enforce" the condition of the EULA that the program only be used on one computer at a time. It is designed to prevent a single (legal) licensed copy being used on multiple machines and by multiple users with the same serial number. Whilst irritating, enforcement of the licence condition that the program only be used on one machine per licence is not, of itself, unreasonable (after all, every user agreed to this when s/he bought the licence).

[That said, perhaps the hardware profile check could be softened a little so that at least there's no need to go through the hoops of re-authentication every time someone upgrades their graphics drivers or firmware or changes the hardware configuration by attaching or removing a removable drive.]