How to Postpone Vista activation for a year

With the release of Windows XP in 2001 Microsoft implemented a technology called Microsoft Product Activation (MPA). According to Microsoft this was developed to combat software piracy. But it has never lived upto Microsoft’s expectation. After you install Windows XP (or Windows Vista) you need to activate it within 30 days, failing doing that it will become dysfunctional. Where as in Microsoft Office product the activation should be done within first 50 launch of the program. Most of the piracy of Windows XP took place from the Volume License key of Windows XP provided to corporate, who just needs only one key to install and activate thousands of Windows XP. So in vista this technique was modified and a cumbersome technology called Volume Licensing 2.0 which required to set up a “Key Management Service” (KMS). But it places a heavy burden to Corporate hence Microsoft developers invented a registry key (”skiprearm”) that helps to corporate IT administrators to reduce this burden.

Brian Livingstone of windowssecrets has demonstrated this simple registry hack by exploiting the skiprearm and a simple command to extend the Vista Activation requirement to almost a year.

Here is the step by step instruction:

Step 1. In Windows Vista

that hasn’t yet been activated, click the Start button, type ‘regedit’ without quote into the Search box, then press Enter to launch the Registry Editor.

Step 2. Explore down to the following Registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ SL

Step 3. Right-click the Registry key named SkipRearm and click Edit. The default is a Dword (a double word or 4 bytes) with a hex value of 00000000. Change this value to any positive integer, such as 00000001, save the change, and close the Registry Editor.

Step 4. Start a command prompt with administrative rights. The fastest way to do this is to click the Start button, enter cmd in the Search box, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. If you’re asked for a network username and password, provide the ones that log you into your domain. You may be asked to approve a User Account Control prompt and to provide an administrator password.

Step 5. Type one of the following two commands and press Enter:

slmgr -rearm
or
rundll32 slc.dll,SLReArmWindows

Either command uses Vista’s built-in Software Licensing Manager (SLMGR) to push theactivation deadline out to 30 days after the command is run. Changing SkipRearm from 0 to 1 allows SLMGR to do this an indefinite number of times. Running either commandinitializes the value of SkipRearm back to 0.

Step 6. Reboot the PC to make the postponement take effect. (After you log in, if you like, you can open a command prompt and run the command slmgr -xpr to see Vista’s new expiration date and time. I explained the slmgr command and its parameters in my Feb. 15 article.)

Step 7. To extend the activation deadline of Vista indefinitely, repeat steps 1 through 6 as necessary.

You can find the full article in Brian’s news letter in his website.