RemoveWGA will enable you to easily remove the Microsoft "Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications" tool, which is calling home and connect to MS servers every time you boot. Futures updates of this notification tool will (officialy) 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 removes the notification part, phoning home, and does not touch the Validation part.
Here are some key features of "RemoveWGA":
· 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 popup only if it is found (usefull for checking automatically at startup for instance)
Note: Some antivirus and antispyware programs flag RemoveWGA as being infected/malware, although the application is perfectly safe and does not pose a threat to your system. This is called a 'false positive'. The term false positive is used when antivirus software wrongly classifies an innocuous ( inoffensive ) file as a virus. The incorrect detection may be due to heuristics or to an incorrect virus signature in a database. [Similar problems can occur with antitrojan or antispyware software.]
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Added more error checks (files existing, processes can be read, etc...)
· Added more files to be deleted : WGANotify.settings, WgaNotify.log
· Set all files to be deleted at next reboot instead of just the system32 ones (Wgalogon and WgaTray)
