Again, purely in the spirit of scientific research, I had a go with this about a month ago.

I fitted an old hard disk in the machine, just in case it fouled other partitions up, and installed a copy of Vista (home premium) without a product key. Then ran the hack ... voila! Activated Vista. No problems. Didn't have to enter any product keys or answer any questions. It really is *that easy*.

I think that MS is downplaying this, because if they make a lot of fuss - "All is lost", wailing and gnashing of teeth stuff - a lot more people will pay attention and the crack will spread (no pun intended).

Incidentally, Vista didn't detect my onboard 3com network port, Intel video or sound chipsets. So its kinda useless to me, but that's an issue that's been done to death already.