i always felt slightly odd using a pirated operating system... like it wasnt really mine... my advice is to just pay for a copy. itll save you loads of time and hastle to just buy a copy and forget about it. youll find all sorts of weird stuff happens with a pirated version. i had a pirated copy of vista, then i got a nVidia motherboard and somehow it tweaked that vista wasnt legit, even though i had applied all the patches and stuff.