RemoveWGA
Back in 2007 I briefly wrote about Windows Genuine Advantage Removal.
I have decided to revisit this topic after Microsoft released Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) recently and writing about how to remove the OGA notifier.
Originally most people used the RemoveWGA.exe (archived site), however Microsoft put pressure on the author (archived site) to remove it.
Although it worked very well, it now had a few more issues than before…
- Unavailable for download from the original source
- No further updates
- A closed source compiled binary executable
- No way to check what it was doing
To overcome this, similar to what was done for RemoveOGA, I wrote a batch script that does the actions required to remove the WGA files.
Introducing RemoveWGA.bat, an open source batch file that removes all of the WGA files…
- Download removewga.bat (Right click and save as removewga.bat)
Alternatively Microsoft have instructions on how to disable or uninstall the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications for Windows XP.
Update
Once you have removed the WGA, you’ll probably need to set your Windows Automatic Updates correctly so it doesn’t install again while you get other updates. This way you should never have to visit the Windows Update site (www.update.microsoft.com). Here’s what to do…
- Set “Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them”
- How to configure and use Automatic Updates in Windows XP OR
- Run setauoptions.bat with option 2
- Restart the Windows Update Service
Once you’ve done that, the Windows Update service should start. You should now see a yellow exclamation mark in your system tray (next to your clock). When you click that, you’ll get the option to do an “Express” or “Custom” install.
You must select a “Custom” install. From there you can Uncheck the Windows Genuine Advantage Notification (KB905474) update and then hide the update in future.
Now you should never have to worry about WGA again!
Enjoy!
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It might be an idea for me to rename it to removewga.cmd instead.
Browsers seem to have less trouble with downloading and saving .cmd files, rather than .bat files.
Perhaps rename the files name_bat.txt to also
avoid n00bs running things by mistake.
(I do it on a few of my own files that i myself dont
want to run by mistake, hehe)
It’s almost kinda similar to Linux chmod +x.
I enjoy your work on wga, it’s annoying and hard
to discover by myself. (I’m one of those that fiddle with everything, so this no doubt saved me much time)
Technically, your entry to the hosts file is a bug. The behavior of trying to access the IP address 0.0.0.0 is undefined so anything could happen in the future.
The IP that should be used instead is 127.0.0.1 which will redirect any queries destined for mpa.one.microsoft.com to the localhost .
@JasonG
I did originally use 127.0.0.1, but that seemed to cause a problem. I forget why. Probably confusion as I run a httpd on my localhost and visiting mpa.one.microsoft.com in your browser leads to confusion. I did consider using 127.0.0.2 instead, but when I looked others had used “0.0.0.0″ in hosts file for this kind of thing.
0.0.0.0 is not “undefined” it is the broadcast address. Nothing can be routed to this address as such, so I don’t really see it as a bug, more as probably the best idea.
If you see any reason why not to use 0.0.0.0 let me know, meanwhile I don’t really see it as a bug.