I run a Dell Inspiron 9300.

It had the 1.6 Ghz Pentium M stock processor, and I upgraded it myself to the 2.0 Ghz Pentium M.

I have not had any issues with WGA running on either processor, so I would venture to say your daughters machine should be fine.

The reports from Microsoft indicated that a very small percentage of the computers that had been flagged as invalid were actually inaccurate.

The bigger question mark seems to be the Office version of WGA currently being tested by a select group of people returning invalid data.

You might consider testing it before she goes off to college to verify that she won't have any issues.

I have spoken with a couple people who were running copies of Windows XP from a site license (and should not be), and they indicated that they received a message that they could not be validated for updates, but their computers still ran. I suggested that maybe they go to the local PC store and purchase a copy of Windows XP to solve the issue, to which I received a look like that was out of the question. I suppose it all depends on your priorities.

For my part, I have no issue with the WGA control being installed, it just takes an extra 30 seconds or so to scan the system.

Never had any problem with WGA. You shouldn't really have to worry about it unless the Windows version isn't legal.

The real problem with WGA was that in its original form, it called home EVERY DAY!
This has been changed but it sure looked like big brother was looking to see what I do with my comp.
Treat the customer like a pirate.....
BTW, I am not a pirate.

I personally use Firefox as my main browser. Of course you cant access the Microsoft Updates site using Firefox. However there is an extension for Firefox called Windiz Update. This add-on will take you to the Windiz site and download and install the updates for you, just like Microsoft's site does. The other good thing about it is that it has never even offered to allow me to install the WGA files and has worked without a hitch every week. Check it out, I think you may enjoy at least having this alternative.

I was on a tech site that had a writer get a pirate copy of win XP, and he couldn't get WGA to ID it as counterfeit! Here is the link I got from /. Link

You could look into autopatcher. Their message board is hosted at Neowin.

Well, that was interesting.

Probably should have just waited until the August Full came out. I thought I could just do the April full and then the July update. Wrong.

Thanks for the link on that though Bakerstreet. It's a very handy way of doing updates.

yup, got that one for my daughters machine. Nice to see you can opt out of the wga . Since that update there has come news that one of the patches can break IE. That's pretty much the reason I don't use the auto update. The patch is kb918899. The only recourse at the moment is to call MS support for the fix. They plan to patch their patch someime 'soon'.