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What is RemoveWGA?
RemoveWGA enables you to remove the Microsoft "Windows
Genuine Advantage Notifications" tool, which is calling home and
connect to Microsoft servers every time you boot. Futures updates
of this notification tool will (officialy) setup the connection rate to
once every two weeks.
Once the WGA Notification tool has checked your OS and has
confirmed you had a legit copy, there is no decent point or reason
to check it again and again every boot. Moreover, connecting to
Microsoft brings security issue for corporate networks, and privacy
issues for everyone. It is also unclear which information are
transmitted (Microsoft published an official answer, but an
individual study brought some questions). All of that, along the fact
that Microsoft used deceptive ways to make you install this tool (it
was told you it was an urgent security update, whereas it is a new
installation giving you no extra security) makes me calling this tool
a spyware.
Also, Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications
Windows Genuine Advantage Validation. RemoveWGA only
remove the notification part, phoning home, and does not touch
the Validation part. As the time I'm writting this, the Validation part
is mandatory for some not critical downloads from Microsoft, but
the Notification part is not mandatory at all, and you are able to
install all of the security updates without installing this one. This
may change in the future thought, I don't know what are the
Microsoft plans.
Download
Link : RemoveWGA.exe
Size : 10 KB
RemoveWGA v1.02
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To see the CHANGELOG, cl i ck
Size : 10 KB
MD5 : 344CC42E20A35DE0197BE8F8CECAD8A2
SHA-1 : F752F44FC76EE273052C1DD9BF08627515C8EBE2
Compatible : Windows XP (SP1/SP2)
(if you tested it on Windows 2K/2K3, please keep me informed of
the results)
Features
* Tell you if the WGA notification tool is active on your system
* Allows you to remove the WGA notification tool from your system
* Accept the "-silent" command line parameter to silently check if
the WGA notification tool is active on your system, and popup only
if it is found (usefull for checking automatically at startup for
instance)
Known issues
1 - One user which had a particular patched "uxtheme.dll" (to allow
applying custom WinXP themes) wasn't able to run the tool. I had
only one report like this, moreover the patched DLLs (uxtheme.dll)
I have tested do not conflict.
Anyway just in case, there is version with the WinXP theme style
support disabled : download
2 - If RemoveWGA is blocked/intercepted by another security
application, it may prevent it to run completly fine until the end, and
it may kill it. If a security application popups about RemoveWGA,
you must allow it in order to remove the WGA notification part.
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