Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Serdar Unal

Mukesh Karki

Yusuf Atas

Clark David Nicholson

Jason Michael Anderson

Bhrighu Sareen

Robert Ian Oliver

Mohammed Zubair Ansari

Wes Witt

A portable rewritable medium and a method are provided for preventing unauthorized use of executable software stored on the portable rewritable medium. A portion of the software stored on the portable rewritable medium may include instructions for a processing device to determine whether execution of the executable software is permitted. If execution of the executable software is permitted, the processing device may execute the executable software directly from the portable rewritable medium. Characteristics of the portable rewritable medium may be checked to determine whether functionality of the executable software is to be limited.

Protection of software on portable medium

In various embodiments, a user may, via a processing device, indicate a desire to purchase a feature of an installed software product. A purchase request may be sent to an e-commerce server, or other server. The purchase request may be validated and information concerning the software product, the feature of the software product, and the processing device may be stored. Enabling information may be sent to the processing device to enable the feature of the software product. In some embodiments, the user may request a trial of a feature of a software product before purchasing the feature. In other embodiments, the user may deactivate a purchased feature of a software product on one processing device and may activate the purchased feature of the software product on a different processing device.

Purchasing of individual features of a software product

An improved operating system method that, in addition to the primary operating system, stores one or more alternate or recovery operating systems. The system monitors the operation of the present operating system and accesses the alternate or recovery operating system based on a fail-over algorithm when a fault condition is detected. The alternate or recovery operating systems are periodically updated.

Operating system update and boot failure recovery

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Serdar Unal