The WGA servers being down will not disable features, only a successful login to WGA and an unsuccessful authentication does that.

For your information and discussion:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/08/27/Vista-XP-owners-considered-pirates-after-WGA-meltdown_1.html

You’ll see, there, that what you say isn’t happening has, in fact, happened at least twice, and tons of users are complaining about it.

Peace,
Gene

The WGA servers being down will not disable features, only a successful login to WGA and an unsuccessful authentication does that.

I think you need to read this comment again:

Well, maybe not having Aero eye-candy is a good thing, as it’s apt to speed up Vista’s tepid performance tremendously. In passing, isn’t it interesting that the best some people could say about Vista benchmarking is that its performance hits are usually not severe, unless, of course, you enable Aero on a notebook.

You’ll notice that I’m not personally attacking the performance, but mentioning what other people say. And they are generally product reviewers. It’s also something that’s not easily disputed, however.

Now as to your other issue: Consider the consequences of those servers being down for several days — as they were recently — and how many PCs phoned home during that period, and you’ll see the consequences of this problem.

At the same time, if WGA were less intrusive, the purpose of confirming the software is genuine wouldn’t be so irritating.

Peace,
Gene

So for an article that is not an attack on Windows as a software product, you sure give Aero and Vista performance a lot of criticism.

Also, Windows won’t cripple itself if the activation server is offline, it only cripples itself if it authenticates with the server and determines that your copy is not genuine. There is a BIG difference.