Microsoft has revealed that piracy rates for Window Vista are nearly half that of Windows XP, as the vendor claimed Vista is harder to copy.

In the past quarter, Microsoft attributed five percentage points of additional growth in Windows desktop licence sales to OEM partners to piracy declines.

Michala Wardell, head of anti-piracy at Microsoft UK, said: “With Windows Vista, we’re making it harder for pirates to counterfeit Windows. We’re seeing a significant decrease in the number of Vista validation failures. This is on top of how we’ve managed to eliminate volume activation exploits, which were a leading source of counterfeit problems.”