Update: The patch no longer working. For complete listing of more ways to bypass the new WGA update, check it out here.

As detailed in Bypass Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Check in Windows Update, Microsoft has made it harder for illegitimate, or for whatever reason, your copy of Microsoft Windows couldn’t be validated, users to retrieve updates via Microsoft Updates or Windows Update, and download programs from Microsoft Download Center.

If you just want to download and apply critical updates to your system, you will be still able to do that without any hack and crack. Just set your Windows’ Automatic Updates (found in Control Panel) setting to Automatic, and let Windows does the updating job in the background. The downside is, it won’t get for you the optional updates.

If you want to download optional components from Windows Update, or simply want to download Windows Defender, Windows Media Player 10, Photo Story 3, DirectX 9 and other application softwares from Microsoft Download Center that require WGA validation tool, you will need to apply a easy and safe hack to bypass the checking.

  1. Open Windows Explorer by clicking Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Windows Explorer.
  2. Browse to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Windows Genuine Advantage\data folder.
  3. Delete (or backup or move to another folder, if you want) data.dat file.
  4. Create a new empty data.dat: You can create a new text file by (make sure you are at the right folder at above) clicking File -> New -> Text Document or right clicking on Windows Explorer window then click New -> Text Document. Then, either rename the file to data.dat. The original .txt extention of the text file need to be changed too. You can disable the hiding of extension of known file types, or follow the following steps to create a new file out of the text file:
    • Open the text document you just created.
    • Click on File -> Save As.
    • Change the Save as type to “All Files”.
    • In the File name, type data.dat
    • Click Save.
    • Go back to the Windows Explorer, at folder C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Windows Genuine Advantage\data, check that data.dat exists.
    • Delete the text file you created previously.
  5. Set the attributes of data.dat to Hidden and Read-Only. Attributes can be set by right click on the data.dat file, and then click on Properties.
  6. Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation check has been disabled.

Note: The data.dat that are replacing the original data.dat can be blank text file or empty, or you may type whatever you want there.

With this hack (or crack if you want), Windows WGA piracy check will be bypassed and you can now download software from Download Center or apply updates from Microsoft/Windows Updates.

Note: The hack no longer able to remove Microsoft Genuine Advantage that pop-up “This copy of Windows is not genuine” warning message by telling you that WGA encounters error when trying to perform validation. More details and ways to bypass WGA available here.