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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."
...does it run with activation key? SCNR :-)
Since microsoft have made it perfectly clear that they don't want anyone running their OS without paying, why continue to try, how about giving one of the many shiny desktop linux distros a go instead?
Software Freedom Day!.
Seriously, they do have this little windows update thing that sends out updates, I'm sure it's mostly trivial for them to fix the flaw
Yes, delaying activation is fine, but why would you want Vista in the first place? My laptop died recently and I bought a replacement Thinkpad. It came pre-loaded with Vista Business. I gave it a try for two weeks.
- Despite having 1GB RAM, the laptop ran like a glued snail.
- Network speed was inconsistent and seems to be bound to movements of the sun.
- Many printers (including my HP 2600n) are still unsupported. Not sure if this is HP being their usual crap self or just a complete inability to get Vista to play properly with network printers.
- Aero. Why?
- So many features like "Map Network Drive" have now been moved so they can only be access from specfic areas like "My Computer"
- The updated XP style for control panel etc is really frustrating.
- When opening some MS Office 2007 applications, the screen would corrupt then everything would hang for about 3 minutes.
- Maybe a problem with Vista's sound libraries? Music sounded tinny through Vista, but cleaner in XP on the same machine.
Anyways, enough of that bollocks. I've wiped the whole disk and installed XP pro again.
There are hacks out there to modify the countthe activation timer so that it never times out. The cracking group Parardox also supposedly released a crack that is suppose to emulate a bios to bypass the activation process all together.
Microsoft tells ya how to do it.
How long before we see this as a Slashdot user name? "Hi, I'm Skip -- Skip Rearm."
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
My Linux box runs for at least a year without activation also.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
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A security issue has been identified that could allow you to compromise your Windows-based system using regedit and gain control of your licensing destiny. You can help protect our destiny by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you wil be required to restart your computer.
the so-called sysadmins in Corporate settings who will not learn ipconfig, iptables and basic Unix commands..
$ ipconfig
bash: ipconfig: command not found
$ echo "alias ipconfig=ifconfig" >> ~/.bashrc
It's never ceased to amaze me the sheer number of workarounds one collects when using or administering Windows systems. To say nothing of endless variations of regkeys and values that must be memorised, but change frequently enough to remind you that the sum total of your knowledge is mostly a collection of useless trivia.