How to ditch WGA

There are many sites online that purport to help you remove WGA from your system, but Microsoft recently changed WGA and many of those sites now offer outdated advice. I have yet to see a definitive work on removing WGA, and I don't consider this writing to be either. Since WGA is still in beta, and still under development, I suspect that the best set of instructions is yet to come.

A large portion of these instructions are based on Microsoft's "How to disable or uninstall the pilot version of Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications" KnowledgeBase article, which showed a July 12, 2006 revision date at the time that I prepared this article

Important: These instructions require editing the registry. You may want to start by creating a System Restore point so that you can revert to it in the event that something goes wrong. Also, I attempt to go beyond uninstalling WGA Notifications to uninstalling other aspects and leave-behinds of WGA. I can't promise that you won't run into trouble. The one thing I can tell you is that I've done all this on my own computers without incident.

To make a System Restore point, open the Start menu, choose Run, copy and paste this line into the Run field, and press Enter: