ChrisMcKee Designs

So you own a legal version of Windows, lucky old you, but those meanies at Microsoft are forcing a piece of spyware upon you just to download the updates and software for your legit software. Now that's simply not fair now is it.

Luckily the nice people at firewalltester.com have released a handy tool that lets you, once you have installed and verified your windows is legitimate, stop windows phoning home. After all your windows is legal why should you have to suffer that rubbish.

http://www.firewallleaktester.com/removewga.htm

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 (officially) 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 is different than Windows Genuine Advantage Validation. RemoveWGA only remove the notification part, phoning home, and does not touch the Validation part. As the time I'm writing 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
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)

* 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 pop-up only if it is found (useful for checking automatically at start-up for instance)


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 completely 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.