{"id":8865,"date":"2014-12-28T08:37:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-28T13:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=8865"},"modified":"2015-02-02T07:25:12","modified_gmt":"2015-02-02T12:25:12","slug":"warning-windows-is-not-genuine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/warning-windows-is-not-genuine\/","title":{"rendered":"Warning: Your copy of Windows is not genuine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"not-genuine\"<\/a>This\u00a0Copy of Windows is Not Genuine<\/h1>\n

Hundreds of thousands of Windows 7 users\u00a0have recently received a warning that says their copy of Windows is not genuine. Some of you have called what you thought was Microsoft support because you googled to get the number. This probably led you to call a fake Microsoft number. And if you did that, they probably got your permission to connect to your computer. Some of you had to pay. Others were the reason you were getting that warning about Windows not being genuine was malware – and they offered to sell you a program or to clean the malware from your computer.<\/p>\n

Our first tip to you: Be careful when googling to get the Microsoft number. Here’s an example of what you’ll most likely get. As you can see the scammers rule. If you call any one of those first three numbers you’re not going to get the help you need; you’re not going to end up being happy \u00a0and most likely you’ll end up infected with something or you’ll be paying a lot of money for nothing. See the image below:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The real reason why you got the “This\u00a0copy of Windows is not genuine” message:<\/strong><\/p>\n

But the reason most of you got the “This copy of Windows is not genuine” warning is because of a\u00a0botched Windows update released by Microsoft on December 9, 2014 via Windows update. \u00a0The offending Windows Update patch is KB 3004394. And one of the troubleshooting issues is that the bad patch may not even show up on your system.<\/p>\n

Thousands of Windows users started complaining to Microsoft about KB 3004394 within hours of it being released on Tuesday, December 9. Besides causing the “This copy of Windows is not genuine” error, the patch causes bogus UAC prompts, Windows Defender won’t start, VirtualBox stopped working, and many others.<\/p>\n

Microsoft pulled the patch on Thursday, December 11 advising people who were affected by the KB3004394 patch to manually remove it. However, most people could not remove it manually via Control Panel because it did not show up there. And worse, removing it manually often causes more problems that it solves.<\/p>\n

So if you’re one of the millions of Windows users who recently started getting the “This\u00a0copy of Windows is not genuine” DO NOT google Microsoft Support and take a chance on making the problem worse; \u00a0what you need to do is head to http:\/\/support.microsoft.com\/kb\/3024777<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0 and there you will find the answer and the solution to the “This copy of Windows is not genuine” error.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This\u00a0Copy of Windows is Not Genuine Hundreds of thousands of Windows 7 users\u00a0have recently received a warning that says their copy of Windows is not genuine. Some of you have called what you thought was Microsoft support because you googled to get the number. This probably led you to call a fake Microsoft number. And if you did\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8865"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8865"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9056,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8865\/revisions\/9056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}