Well, so much for closing piracy loopholes! With Windows Vista and Office 2007 only just going Gold, and not even available to Microsoft beta testers, developers or volume licence subscribers, the first cracked versions have already hit the pirate boards. The Windows version which has been released is called Vista BillGates. It doesn't feature any activation cracks itself, and the supplied product key is just for the installation.

The activation crack is a separate download, and works by replacing the licensing components with components from beta builds. Then using a product key from Beta 1, Beta 2, RC1 or RC2, the Gold version of Vista can be activated online. In this sense, it's not a true crack - it's simply leveraging off compatibilities between the betas and the Gold release. Vista still needs to be activated, and it looks like for the moment, there's no way around that.