Vista Can Run Without Activation for a Year

An anonymous reader gave us a heads up on this article for people who like putting things off. It begins: "Windows Vista can be run for at least a year without being activated, a serious end-run around one of Microsoft's key anti-piracy measures, Windows expert Brian Livingston said today. Livingston, who publishes the Windows Secrets newsletter, said that a single change to Vista's registry lets users put off the operating system's product activation requirement an additional eight times beyond the three disclosed last month. With more research, said Livingston, it may even be possible to find a way to postpone activation indefinitely."

Comments

Re:Why Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many printers (including my HP 2600n) are still unsupported. Haha. You were suckered into the age-old "host based printer" scam. "Host based" printers don't internally support a standard printer language like PostScript or PCL. Instead, the printer only supports a proprietary protocol which requires a specialized, vendor-provided OS-specific driver. Only in a few cases have people been able to reverse-engineer a subset of these protocols.

A major disadvantage to this for consumers that it allows manufacturers to "sunset" older printers.

That's why I only buy standards-based printers - it allows me to decide when my printer is no longer viable. All of my printers are more than 10 years old, and I have no plans to retire any of them.

Printer manufacturers don't provide host based printers in order to save inordinate amounts of money per unit - the chipsets required to support PCL and/or postscript are very inexpensive. This is all about vendor control.