Windows Vista crack methods now have a new twist. In their "ingenuity" - the inverted commas are there to underline irony - hackers have mashed up together two workarounds for activating the operating system. The result is a combination of a KMS spoofed server and the Frankenbuild crack. And the fact of the matter is that this crack is useless. Windows Vista copies that will be activated via this method will be thrown in Reduced Functionality Mode at the first pass of the WGA.

Microsoft has already updated the Windows Genuine Advantage mechanism to render inoperable Vista copies activated via spoofed KMS servers and with files from release candidate builds of the OS. And in fact this unfortunate combination of cracks only comes to show that Microsoft's efforts with WGA are not in vain.

Just because at the end of an 11 step process that requires dubious downloads loaded with malicious code, the users will have a perfectly useless copy of the operating system on their desktop. Out of all the available cracks for Vista this is a joke. And it comes at a time when Microsoft has already taken the necessary measures to counteract both aspects of the workaround.

And although this crack promises to activate Windows Vista Ultimate, it actually manages to strip the Ultimate version of enough features so that it will be down at the level of Business or Enterprise. Microsoft is also hard at work on another update for the TimerStop 2099 Vista crack since early January, when the Redmond Company acknowledged the existence of the workaround.